In Memory of Henry Longhurst - 12 September 2003

I sit here on a shiny September morning looking over the Central Park, a scene as beautiful as it was when I first sat here tapping out "Good evening" 53 years ago.

Except I imagine there's a more bulbous foliage than there was, for the rolling forest of green surely grows higher in 50-odd years, just as surely as I've grown smaller by, to be truthful, five and a half inches.

Suddenly this trance is rudely interrupted by a swift ripping sound across the Western sky, as of tearing a bed sheet.

It's an F-15 darting by at an 150 miles an hour or so. For the past two years the ever-watchful patrol over thousands of miles across this continent.

It explains in a flash why I'm sitting here talking to you on Friday morning and not the usual Thursday.

Because yesterday was not the usual Thursday but the dreaded anniversary of 11 September, a date we've long approached with apprehension.

And just in case, it seemed prudent not to put out this talk and next day find it must be stifled to make for - heaven knows what.

This occasion reminded me painfully of the week in the long ago - and there's no point in being coy about the long ago - it was a Saturday in April 1961.

In those days I used to record my talk on Friday, for a first broadcast on Sunday evening. And so it went.

Nothing of great moment was happening. So I must have done a light, I hope entertaining, talk about I have no idea what.

Next day, the Saturday, the world's newspapers and radio and television sets screamed with the awesome news that the first human being ever to orbit the Earth in a manned missile had done it. He was a Russian and his name was Yuri Gagarin.

A day or two later there appeared, as usual then, the BBC's own literary critical weekly magazine. it was called The Listener.

And they had, of course, a radio critic of some distinction. But even the most distinguished, the most sophisticated listener shares the delusion that the speaker he's hearing is speaking to him at that moment.

As in those days I was a pretty alert daily correspondent and I'd probably picked up the word about Gagarin well before the distinguished critic but not in time to include it in my broadcast.

Nevertheless he wrote a jokey piece about the unflappability, the cheerful blindness of A. Cooke.

It ended: "When the final hydrogen bomb has exploded, no doubt, over North America, Alistair Cooke will be still there in New York waffling away as usual."

But it was not prudence this week that held back my hand by 24 hours, it was simply fear.

New Yorkers have learned to live with fear, especially the people of Manhattan who were here and saw it and who wake with new thankfulness to every ordinary morning.

But I'm not going to dwell on this or its anniversary. Happily I have an anniversary of my own to celebrate.

Thanks to the happenstance of reaching for an old bed book - a memorial collection of the writings of an old friend, a simple blissful writer who I discovered just 25 years ago.

The re-reading of his confidential, comical prose brings him back so vividly I cannot believe he's been dead for more than a month or two.

So I shall attempt to bring to life a man about whom very likely not one listener in a thousand has ever heard.

His name was Henry Longhurst. For over 40 years he wrote a weekly column for the London Sunday Times.

I said once that he wrote about golf but I have to say that a readership survey showed that about a half of his regular readers did not know a mid-iron from a midwife - they knew not a thing about golf.

But he wrote about the game as an exercise in human vanity. He might just as well have chosen to write about - which by the way he did - oil drilling, toboggan racing, military service, the ordeal of making a maiden speech in parliament, the motives that propelled an old lady over Niagara in a barrel.

Human nature was his true topic, its fusses and follies. Whatever was bold, charming, idiotic or eccentric about people.

But first, the man - his appearance.

Portly, is the word. A small, portly man with a considerable bow window - portly cheeks held up by two or three chins. A nose like a small, unripe tomato. Permanently blood shot eyes - brought on, it could be said, by his constant professional exposure to sun and wind or possibly by the sheer brazen untruth of one of his opening sentences: "My knowledge of golf club bars is somewhat limited as I'm usually out on the course most of the time."

His eyes, however, were the thing and if the eyes are the mirror of the soul then Longhurst's eyes reflected his slyness, his wryness, his wariness and also his affability, his willingness to believe in a recipe for a perfect law, a new golf swing, a better mousetrap or any splendid idea you had in mind provided you could show him that it worked.

Most professional golfers and most long-time golf writers, I imagine, boast of the number of countries, say 20, that they've been in. Which usually means that they've seen 20 airports, 20 golf courses and 20 motels.

Henry Longhurst, I should guess, had seen or played golf in at least 30 countries but what comes down most memorably from his overseas golf trips is a glimpse, a true sniff, of the country itself.

Thus, I'm sure I've read many pieces of his about golf in Ireland but the unforgettable note is about the feel of Dublin.

A city of strange contrasts - the breathtaking beauty of some of the old Georgian streets glowing in the evening sun. By day the utilitarian drabness of the town - a pale woman singing in the gutter, carrying, like the London communists, a baby in her arms, possibly her own.

After what he calls "a thoroughly Irish evening" he lay slumbering next morning when "the elderly hotel valet, sizing up the situation, shook me by both shoulders. He asked me not would I like the curtains drawn but 'Will I give ye the daylight?'"

Longhurst helped construct golf courses in strange places from the Alps to the Persian desert but what emerges in his stories from these places is the fact that he is by birth and instinct a countryman. He got to know and rejoice in the trees, the flowers, the birds, the grasses of landscapes from Japan to John O'Groats.

We have no account of the golf tournament he was covering, if any, in Rangoon but his precious memory is of being joined one evening by an insect.

"He sat beside my soup. He was a beautiful shiny green about three and a half inches tall. His grasshopper wings folded neatly down his back and he sat back on his haunches against the salt cellar, rubbing his little hands together as though to partake of the feast. A preying mantis, a person of harmless delight. If it weren't so cold in England I'd have them all over the house."

Although Henry was without a doubt an old type of rural county conservative, the whips could never depend on him for an automatic vote.

He bore a steady objection to most government regulations even quite small compulsions like, say, the wearing of a seat belt.

One of perhaps the six best golfers of all time died - a small, trim, monosyllabic Texan, name of Ben Hogan.

Inevitably Henry recounted the rousing, appalling story of how Hogan, driving with his wife once on a dark night, was hit head-on by a truck and suffered shattering wounds.

He had dived to protect his wife as the steering wheel pierced the driver's seat.

But, to the astonishment of the golfing world, Hogan tottered and limped and worked and worked, and within three years had won the Masters and the United States and the British Open championships.

Longhurst wrote: "And to think, if he'd been wearing his seat belt, he would have been dead and gone 25 years ago."

Once suddenly when Henry was well into his 60s a note appeared in the Sunday paper instead of his column. He'd gone on a leave of absence.

He was in fact going off for a cancer operation about which nobody I can think of could write with such tact and even humour.

Three months later he was back, writing "Where were we, then, when we were so abruptly interrupted?"

The reason he gave: "I had visited the doctor with a complaint which, though a trifle coarse, was one I venture to set down."

It was a colon cancer which "required, if you will forgive me, an artificial orifice in the side of the body. Let me say to encourage the others that the modern apparatus for coping is really wonderful.

"Not to worry. Here I am restored to normal channels about to offer my readers my good wishes for a Christmas I never expected to see."

You see, beyond the knowing wink and the prose style, which was as effortless as falling out of bed, there was a fine strain of bravery.

So on this 25th anniversary let us raise a glass - Henry would be the first to join us - to a good man, a rare bird and a blessed writer: Henry Longhurst.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

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