Howard Marshall

Howard Percival Marshall (22 August 1900 at Sutton, Surrey – ) 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. Life Marshall was the only son of publisher Percival Marshall and Zoe Beatrice (née Bridger). After Haileybury, he went to Oriel College, Oxford, winning a rugby union Blue. He captained the Harlequins rugby team. He trained as a journalist, and joined the BBC in 1927. Within ten years he had become the premier radio Outside Broadcast commentator, being chosen to describe the coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth in 1937, as well as that of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. The live broadcasting of cricket had begun, in a limited fashion, in 1927, with ‘eye witness’ summaries by Pelham Warner, as it was generally thought that ball-by-ball commentary would not work for a game as slow as cricket. However, this began to change around 1932 when the influential Seymour de Lotbiniere ('Lobby’) - who became BBC's Head of Outside Broadcasting in 1935 - began to believe that ball-by-ball commentary could make compelling radio. In 1934, he got Marshall to begin commentating on cricket, rather than just giving reports. 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." He commentated on some of the "Victory Tests" in 1945, assisted by Rex Alston, but had moved on to higher things in the BBC when real Test cricket resumed the following year.