The Cricket Writers’ Club was saddened to hear of the recent passing of former Daily Mail cricket correspondent Peter Johnson at the age of 91. Matthew Engel has written a fitting tribute to his life and career below.

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By Matthew Engel

Quite often celebrated cricketers gain a place in the press box to flesh out their retirement (literary skill desirable though not always essential).  And sometimes cricket writers can become famous without being great shakes on the field:  Cardus, Swanton, Arlott.  Others get on with their job year after year, liked and admired by their colleagues, a welcoming and familiar name to their regular readers but never quite household names. 

Peter Johnson, who died on June 11 aged 91, was a prime example. He was one of the game’s best journalists for nearly forty seasons, almost all of them on the Daily Mail. He was a master craftsman whose gently flowing pieces read easily on the page but were always forged with the sweat of his brow.  

It was a miracle that he ever became a journalist at all. Peter was born in Bradford, the only child of devoted parents, an electrician and a mill worker, living in a back-to-back house with shared toilets.  As the Second World War was ending and he was just turning from a cricket-mad kid to a cricket-mad teenager, Peter contracted spinal tuberculosis and spent two years in a sanitorium, unable to move. He had to be rotated continually to avoid body sores. All he could do in this time was read – which he did voraciously – and write. 

By the time he recovered, what passed for his education was practically over, except that he joined the best college in the university of life: as a newsroom dogsbody on an old-fashioned local weekly paper. No one took much notice of him until a story came in about a duck which had somehow managed to halt a civic ceremony in Cleckheaton. The editor wanted to identify the type of duck. No one around him had a clue. Then the office junior had a look at the photo. “It’s a mallard,” said Peter firmly. Thereafter he was known, with more respect than before, as “Duck Boy”.

He climbed the ladder through local dailies, and soon after turning 30 got a job on the Manchester sports desk of the Daily Mirror, whereupon he, his wife Marcella and two small children moved across the Pennines to Cheadle Hulme. In his first summer he covered the Old Trafford semi-final of the Gillette Cup – then in its second year – when MJK Smith stationed six men on the boundary to thwart a run chase, whereupon Lancashire began blocking in disgust and threw the game away. A significant moment of the old cricket being baffled by the new.  Peter got a good show on the back page. 

Three years later he moved to the Mail  where he stayed for the rest of his working life. He was the go-to man for Manchester United in the 1970s,  striking up a good relationship with the ebullient manager Tommy Docherty, less so with his more brooding successor Dave Sexton, as was evident when Sexton was sacked. “No other man who has served a lifetime in the game can have retained so thin a skin,” wrote Peter.

In the summer he became a member of a happy gang of three in the north alongside the erudite (and CWC legend) Derek Hodgson of the Express, and Howard Booth of the Mirror, the expenses genius who successfully invented the concept of “reverse mileage” (the miles he travelled going backwards down his drive). They were all congenial and welcome characters  on the circuit but Peter turned deeply inwards at writing time. “Even for the most routine game, every word he wrote was punctilious,” recalled David Hopps. “He was never relaxed when he was writing.”

In those days the northern sports pages of the Mail were almost autonomous.  And when the much-admired Tom Clarke took over as sports editor in London in 1975 he knew little of Peter’s work. Clarke commissioned one of his star writers, Brian James, to watch a preliminary round FA Cup tie in early September and then follow the winners into the next round and so on, covering up the build-up to every game: Tividale to Wembley was a classic gimmick in the best Mail tradition and turned into a book. 

Come December, when the story had turned to Matlock v Mansfield, James became ill and suggested Peter should take his place until he recovered. The boss was a bit dubious but the stand-in ended up doing the next three rounds.  “He did it brilliantly,” said Clarke. “And I felt by encouraging him we got a real showcase for what he could do. He was a very willing writer able to take on big challenges. I wish I’d worked with him much longer.” 

But Peter enjoyed cricket most and the 1980s was a magical time to be in the thick of the game, which had far more box office characters than hooligan-infested, out-of-favour football. And for the northern writers, page leads on Boycott came along in bucket-loads.  

Johnson’s life was about to change though.  The Mail’s No. 1 cricket correspondent, Peter Smith, left and became Lord’s first-ever PR man and the other Peter was promoted. But in the background, barely known to many of his colleagues, he had a succession of personal crises.  Before he set out on his first full tour, the 1990-91 Ashes, he was told he needed open heart surgery. His cardiologist, being a cricket fan himself, promised to get him fit for his first Ashes tour in 1990-1 and he did, though a lesser man might well have flunked it. 

That was the tour where England players soared into the skies but only in a pair of Tiger Moths, the prank involving David Gower and John Morris when they flew over the ground in Queensland where England were playing a state game  – a story ideal for the Johnson touch:  “Gower began this tour knowing he was expected to conform to the more rigid disciplines of the Micky Stewart-Graham Gooch regime. But you always suspected it could not last, that he was wearing a tuxedo beneath the strait-jacket.”

At home, however, Marcella began to show signs of a rare and terrible form of premature dementia. His daughter Sally was a nurse lived nearby and looked after her mum to allow Peter to keep working and travelling: “I knew that was the only remedy to keep him going.” In 1999, their youngest son Andrew died from a brain haemorrhage. Marcella died in 2002. Through all of this Peter was as stoic and self-contained as he had been through his own youthful illness.  

He retained the job for the rest of the decade, to the delight of the subs who clamoured for his impeccably clean copy. And his occasional exclusives, about which he could be as tight-lipped as he was about his personal troubles.

Peter Johnson’s last Test match in the press box was also Mike Atherton’s last as a player. Atherton scored 13 and 9. Savour this as a way to start a cricket report and finish his own  cricket career:

“He had steeled himself to go without fuss, tears, without even a backward glance.

“But when Mike Atherton’s time came at The Oval yesterday to say farewell to Test cricket, as England were forced to follow on before the rain came, even Iron Mike’s resolve weakened for a second. As he neared the pavilion the crowd rose to him and the sky grew strangely black. 

“All the way from the crease, Atherton had managed, by fixing his unseeing gaze on a point dead ahead, to pretend that this was no different from any of his other 211 England innings. Ten paces from the boundary his resistance broke. He took one swift look over his right shoulder and raised his bat, quickly and self-consciously, as if signalling a secret bid to an auctioneer.”

A lifetime of hard-fought intros culminating in something close to perfection. 

Peter died in the Cheadle Hulme home he had lived in for 61 years.  He leaves Sally and his elder son Simon, two grandsons and three great-grandchildren.

His funeral is scheduled for 3:15pm on Wednesday 9 July at the Rowen Chapel, Stockport Crematorium SK2 6LS, followed by a reception at Disley Golf Club.