Radio days

Ruminating here a couple of weeks ago on those whom the wretched reaper had gaily swiped down last year, Christmas deadlines had a trio of significant hall-of-famers missing: both the Oz horseman Scobie Breasley and the British runner Sydney Wooderson died on 21 December, and a week later the oldest surviving English Test cricketer, Norman Mitchell-Innes, unbuckled his pads for the last time. By coincidence, each of them was aged 92, born in the 1914 summer (of dreaded portent) and therefore members of just about a final generation oblivious of a boyhood surrounded by the incessant jabber and rabbit of round-the-clock sports broadcasting. Scobie, the midget 16-year-old prodigy from Wagga Wagga, had not even known the existence of live ‘wireless’ commentary of horseracing on Sydney’s 2VW station till he had actually ridden the winner, Chagford, of the big city’s 1930 Metropolitan Cup. The same revelation probably hit the spindly, myopic young Wooderson four years later only when friends told how they had heard a BBC voice cheering the unknown, unlikely Brit to a silver medal in the Empire Games mile race at London’s White City.