His elder brother, Sir John Blofeld, became a High Court judge.

I wonder, when did I cease to become impossible?

John appears on earlier censuses with his parents Thomas Calthorpe Blofeld and Fanny Elizabeth (nee Partridge); Thomas was a local magistrate, a profession which was to reappear in the family three generations later: Blowers’s brother is Sir John Blofeld, a former High Court judge whose career included overturning on appeal the convictions of three men who had already served a decade in jail for murder.

She has converted me to all things Italian and loves cricket. Who knows, I might not have commentated on my last… I’ve no idea.”, “I don’t have a like or a dislike for helicopters, pigeons or seagulls – if they’re there, they’re part of the picture, therefore I describe them.”, Despite being surrounded by a preponderance of mementoes, he really seems to mean it when he insists he’s “not a sentimental person. “Admirable, nuts, vainglorious, the manifestation of a truly sensational inferiority complex, sheer perverse bloody-mindedness” is how he described the “Greatest Living Yorkshireman”.

His wife, Dorothy Vernon-Harcourt, had one brother, William; through him, Calthorpe had one nephew and one niece by marriage.

I went to Cambridge two years younger than everyone who had done national service, without the one thing I was good at. I had a double dose of luck – the luck that put me in certain situations, then the luck to have the talent to be able to take advantage. I would never give anyone advice on their romantic life, let alone my younger self. John Calthorpe Blofeld was born in 1875, when WG Grace was at the height of his powers and the first Test had yet to be played. My reflexes were never the same again, 1995: I admired my fellow Test Match Special commentators Brian Johnston and John Arlott, who made the show what it is today. It’s just somewhere that my wife and I like. He attended King's College, Cambridge, but left after two years without receiving a degree. I suppose that is the equivalent of, when you have made 100 at Lords, having Denis Compton – which I did have – walk up from first slip and shake me by the hand!

Of the 16 games that Blofeld played for Cambridge (five in 1958 and 11 in 1959), he kept wicket in only four of them.

He has a daughter, Suki (born 1964), with his first wife. This is my 47th year.”, “I’d rather give up when people still seem to remember me reasonably kindly, rather than when people think: ‘Why the f**king hell didn’t he go 10 years ago?’. The highlight of my year was when I scored my first hundred at Lords. [16][22] His fourth book was entitled Squeezing the Orange. A significant caveat here is that the compilers of the visitations had no way of checking the lineages presented to them, but had to rely on the honesty of the families submitting them. Blofeld missed the 2009 home test series against South Africa but returned for the 2010 home series against Pakistan.

A commonly quoted ‘fact’ about the much-loved Test Match Special commentator Henry Blofeld is that he is the nephew of Freddie Calthorpe, the amateur all-rounder who captained England in a four Test series in West Indies in 1930.

This also being the fourth day of England’s second match of the summer against the West Indies, you might expect Blofeld to be watching the action avidly on Sky, or maybe listening to his radio commentary colleagues on the BBC’s Test Match Special. He has established a reputation as a commentator with an accent, vocabulary and syntax that is quintessentially Old Etonian both in style and substance. The 21st century researcher, to whom the connection might not be quite so obvious, must pick up the thread from Barbara Calthorpe, wife of Sir Henry Gough. Henry Blofeld’s grandparents were married in 1902 — the same year Victor Trumper scored a century before lunch in a Test, Fred Tate dropped one, and Gilbert Jessop’s whirlwind fourth innings century won one — and in the church of St Marylebone, a stone’s throw away from Lord’s.

The thing is to be yourself, try to enjoy it and never forget to laugh. © 2020 Associated Newspapers Limited. [16] He reported on the England tour to India in 1963/4 for The Guardian, and was close to being picked as an emergency batsman to replace the ill Micky Stewart for the 2nd Test in Bombay. Henry, 80, and Valeria, 76, married back in 2013 which is his third marriage until this date.

As a former Mayor of Norwich and subsequently Member of Parliament (MP) for the same city, Thomas Blofeld was evidently considered to be of a suitable status to marry into one of the most prominent families in the county, thus uniting the names of Calthorpe and Blofeld — at around the time the earliest known newspaper reports of cricket were starting to appear, which revealed matches being played between village teams, with enormous sums of money at stake. We are still far from the end of the story, though, since Freddie Calthorpe is not a direct descendant of Catherine, or even closely related to her. Speaking to Michael Parkinson about this on BBC Radio 2 on 26 August 2007, he responded to the question of why he was commentating less these days, by remarking that "they obviously want to bring in new faces" adding that during the Ashes series during 2006–7 "I felt in a funny way that I wasn't part of it any more". Each family was required to submit information regarding its lineage, which was documented in the official record of the visitation. During the summer 2008 season, he resumed a full commentating quota on Tests and ODIs. [17] Blofeld's cricket commentary is characterised by his plummy voice and his idiosyncratic mention of superfluous details regarding the scene, including things such as construction cranes or numbers of pink shirts in the crowd; as well as pigeons, buses, aeroplanes and helicopters that happen to be passing by. 19:30 IST | 14:00 GMT, 07 Nov, 2020

Blofeld took a job at the merchant bank Robert Benson Lonsdale[15] for three years, but it was not to his taste and he drifted into sports journalism.

© 2020 Zee Entertainment Enterprises Limited. I drank too much because I thought it was the grown-up thing to do. In 1841, Grace was not yet born and the idea of a County Championship was still decades away, but there were First-Class matches played between the few existing county sides (Sussex, Kent and Nottinghamshire), as well as the MCC, Cambridge University and the annual Gentlemen vs Players match. I got married when I was 21 to my daughter’s mama who is no longer around. I couldn’t afford it. “It’s a question of painting the picture,” he explains, “and the frame and the mount are in some ways as important as what goes on in the middle. Not many people speak like I do now, whether it’s upper class or whatever it is. That said, I’ve never been frightened of working hard. I’m not someone who is going to go to do my last Test match and blub at the end.

This already casts doubt on the possibility that Blofeld might be Calthorpe’s nephew, but the hypothesis can be demolished even more quickly by working in the opposite direction. It is easy to see how such a supposition may have arisen: Blowers’s Eton and Cambridge education, along with his bow ties and general jolly-good-show demeanour, mark him out as the sort of “dear old thing” who might well be related to a player who bore the style “Honourable” — and, most tellingly, his middle name is Calthorpe. [11] Appointed Eton captain in his final year at school, Blofeld suffered a very serious accident, when he was hit by a bus while riding a bicycle,[8] remaining unconscious for 28 days.[12][7]. Brian was the champion leg puller in the commentary box, but he had quite a bit of help from David Lloyd – or Bumble, as he is widely known. [18] After the tea and lunch breaks he is also known to talk for extended periods of time about the food on offer, in particular cakes, with occasional interruptions to describe the situation on the field.