Howard Marshall (broadcaster)

Howard Percival Marshall (22 August 1900 at Sutton, Surrey – 27 October 1973(1973-10-27) (aged 73)) achieved distinction in several fields, but is best remembered as a pioneering commentator for live broadcasts of state occasions and sporting events — in particular cricket Test matches — for BBC radio during the 1930s.

After Haileybury,[1] he went to Oriel College, Oxford, winning a rugby union Blue.

Marshall was a great success, the poet Edmund Blunden writing: "And then on the air, Mr Howard Marshall makes every ball bowled, every shifting of a fieldsman so fertile with meaning that any wireless set may make a subtle cricket student of anybody."

Nine of his cricket commentaries over the period 1934 to 1945 survive in the BBC archives, including his famous description of Len Hutton at The Oval in 1938 surpassing Don Bradman's record score of 334 in Anglo-Australian Tests.

[4] He married twice (including Nerina Shute) and found time to work as a Director of Personnel and Public Relations in the steel industry, to write several books on sport, housing and exploration, amongst other subjects, and to co-found the magazines Angling Times and Trout and Salmon.