A gift of humour

Alan Gibson

Earlier this summer, in this paper, I was writing about the merits of Neville Cardus and Bernard Darwin, Cardus a cricket writer, so far as his sports writing went, and Darwin, with the same proviso, a golf writer. I said something to the effect that they were the best writers of this century who had chosen sport as a major subject. I would not withdraw this opinion. But I did get an indignant letter from a reader, asking me if! had ever heard of Henry Longhurst.

Well, yes, I had. Indeed! read him, on the

back page of the Sunday Times, week by week for many years; often when about my

daily duty in the lavatory, which, he claimed, was exactly why he had designed the length of his piece, and why he insisted O n having it upon the back page. The days of

newspaper-rests in lavatories (you could swing them out from the wall, and spread a Whole paper on them) had gone, and only a

folded newspaper could be comfortably handled. It has been said that by this prac

tical attention to readers' needs, he sold More copies of the Sunday Times than any Other writer of his time, though this kind of claim is never susceptible of proof. It has been written of him, several times in the obituaries this week, that he attracted readers who were not interested in golf, just as Darwin had done, and just as Cardus

attracted readers who were not interested in cricket. I can vouch for this, because I have never been in the least interested in golf. I have never played it, never watched it, except on television when the family insisted on having it on (though I watched

enough of it to observe, as someone who has occasionally tried the same thing, what an exceptionally astute commentator Longhurst was). So I suppose, and it is my Only qualification for writing about him,

that I am as representative of many of Longhurst's admirers as the host of golfers Which now mourns him. Why did! like reading him so much, when I did not care whether it was Nicklaus or Cotton who had sunk the last putt? Why did so many others? With Darwin or Cardus, you could say something like, 'Oh, the style of the prose', but Longhurst was not one, of the masters of prose. He always wrote competently, grammatically, thoughtfully, rather in the style of his old friend Jim Swanton. Perhaps 'urbane' would be the word for his prose.

What he did have, however, was a sense of humour: I do not use the word in its modern sense, which often implies that a man who is said to have a sense of humour is

a comic turn. Of the numerous definitions of 'humour' in the Shorter Oxford, the one that comes nearest to defining him is: 'The faculty of perceiving what is ludicrous or amusing, and of expressing it . . . Less purely intellectual than wit, and often allied to pathos.' They add a quotation, unattributed except for its date, 1854: 'The happy compound of playfulness and pathos which we style humour.' Yes, that was Henry Longhurst. He was one of the devotees of Young England, the famous play at the Kingsway Theatre (and several others) in the last year before the second world war. Swanton and Ian Peebles were among his colleagues, and all three have written about it. It was a play wriften seriously, about the challenge to the youth of England, and became a success entirely because of the way these youths of England (Conservative to a man, I should guess, and about to be called on to lay down their lives for their country) mocked it. The audience became part of the play. New interruptions were devised every night. But Longhurst had no time for the feebler interruptions. 'Now

then, sir', he would say, 'funny or not at all'.

I met Longhurst on a few radio programmes, and corresponded with him. The last time I exchanged letters with him was when I had sent him a transcription of a noble passage in a book. Manly Games for Boys, by a man calling himself Rawdon Crawley, from the Megatherium Club, in 1869. Major Crawley appears to confuse golf with hockey: 'each party, as in football, endeavouring to drive the ball in an opposite direction.' This amused him, and he wrote a kind letter back, the letter of a generous man, though even then he was not too well.

I never met Robertson-Glasgow, much to my regret. As! write this article, though, it occurs to me that Longhurst and Robertson-Glasgow make a pair, just as, whatever their differences, Darwin and Cardus did. Robertson-Glasgow had written much the same kind of article on the back page of the Observer as Longhurst did in the Sundt.), Times. In RobertsonGlasgow's case, the severe limitation of words was imposed less by perception of the possibilities of the lavatory session than by wartime newsprint: but he had set the mode. Again, you would not consider him among the very best writers of prose, but he made his meaning clear, and often made you laugh, and always was an acute observer of the passing scene. Playfulness and pathos again.

Longhurst, it has often been said this past week, was a raconteur. Raconteurs, especially if they play golf, are usually bores (for though I am no golfer, I meet many, from my family upwards). But he had the knack of telling a story in a few pithy sentences and relating it to whatever else he was intending to say. This gift, the gift of humour, may not be so piercing as the wit's, nor so elegant as the stylist's: but this, I am inclined to think, Wow, officer, I hope you're going to behave is why he was so successful a writer, and so like your TV image.' loved a man.