John Charles Woodcock OBE (7 August 1926 – 18 July 2021) was an English cricket writer and journalist.
[4] As a child, he was a good angler before moving onto cricket while attending St Edward's School, Oxford.
[3][5] He also reached the final trial of the university cricket team and played for the Authentics (Oxford's second XI).
[4][5] After graduating with fourth class honours (which he attributed to his being "very lazy"), he obtained a diploma in education, intending to become a teacher.
[10] He did not support the sporting boycott of South Africa during the apartheid era, but later acknowledged that his position had been wrong.
[9] Unlike other notable cricket journalists such as John Arlott and E. W. Swanton, little of Woodcock's writing is available in book form.
"[12] Woodcock contributed his final piece for The Times in July 2020 as a tribute to the veteran West Indian cricketer Sir Everton Weekes.
According to Derek Pringle, "John Woodcock was the kind of scribe we’d all like to be – elegant, informative and generous with a beautiful turn of phrase."
Simon Wilde said, "Some other cricket correspondents of his generation were more celebrated but he was the best.”[6] According to Matthew Engel, "throughout his long retirement, pilgrims would descend on the thatched Hampshire cottage where Woodcock had lived more for than 70 years to imbibe his wisdom, wine, anecdotes, fellowship, good nature and what became an unparalleled memory of cricket dating back to Donald Bradman and beyond".