He was also president of Sandwich Town Cricket Club; he is labelled as having served the role for "25 years from 1976", although he died in January 2000.

At Altham's invitation, Swanton continued the book to cover the period from the outbreak of World War I onwards.

He was in the rank of acting major when wounded and captured by the Japanese in the Battle of Singapore, and spent three years as a prisoner of war.

His unit spent time in camps along the Burma–Siam railway, and he contracted polio and lost a considerable amount of bodyweight, but his well-thumbed copy of the 1939 Wisden Cricketers' Almanack boosted morale.

His writing style was very spare and simple, reporting what happened and why, without the flourishes of Neville Cardus or John Arlott.

He made his selections as one of the voters for the Wisden Cricketers of the Century in 2000, shortly before he died of heart failure in Canterbury.

The team was: Jack Hobbs, Sunil Gavaskar, Don Bradman, Gary Sobers, George Headley, Keith Miller, Alan Davidson, Godfrey Evans, Lance Gibbs, Bill O'Reilly, Malcolm Marshall.

His obituaries were fulsome, with Ted Dexter in The Sunday Telegraph saying "He was the standard by which other cricket commentators were judged".

She was daughter of Reymond de Montmorency, housemaster at Eton College, and the widow of a chartered accountant, George Carbutt.

A respected biography of Swanton by David Rayvern Allen published shortly after his death revealed many previously unknown facts about his life.