Swanton’s ‘malign influence’
Sir: We all love Frank Keating but he can’t be allowed to get away with his jolly-goodchap defence of E.W. Swanton (Sport, 17 March), and his not-so-veiled attack on Leo McKinstry, whose reasonable criticism of the former Telegraph cricket correspondent irked him so. Swanton had good qualities but he was a terrible snob, and his writing on cricket (desperately dull, by the way) perpetuated a snobbery that characterised so much of English cricket for so long. In his patronage Swanton could indeed be helpful to younger scribes. As a journalist, however, he was a compulsive meddler and had a malign influence on English cricket for half a century. As a good liberal, with a long record of exposing such people, Francis should have recognised that. Instead, he preferred to belittle McKinstry for trying to tell the truth.
Michael Henderson London W13
Previous page
