Biography

Blowers tumbled into this world, so he was reliably informed, on 23rd September 1939. His first cricketing mentor was Miss Paterson whose splendid swingers went both ways when she bowled to him at Sunningdale School. He somehow managed to pass an exam to get to Eton and he played cricket for Eton against Harrow at Lord's when he was fifteen. A year later he slogged a hundred at Lord's for the Public Schools against the Combined Services. But a year after that he gallantly took on a bus with his push bicycle and took no further interest in this world for 28 days.

He went up to King's College, Cambridge where he never scored a run against the examiners and was kicked out after two years. He somehow blagged his way into the Cambridge cricket side in 1959 and had the luck to play in first-class matches against Denis Compton and the great Australian allrounder, Keith Miller. And he scored a first-class hundred at Lord's.

After three ghastly years in the City of London, bowler hat and all, he began to write about cricket as a freelance for The Times in 1962. Broadcasting came along ten years later when he joined the famous Test Match Special team for two one-day games against Australia and he has been clogging up the airways on that programme ever since.

Everywhere he has gone, on countless cricket tours around the world, Blowers has lived life to the full regarding each day as an orange and squeezing it dry of the last drop of juice before moving onto the next day. He is a medical freak having defied a heart by-pass operation which went horribly wrong, a gall bladder that behaved like a deprived monster, picking up the dreaded MRSA along the way. Since then, back and hip operations have followed two-a-penny, but all have been submerged by guffaws of laughter and bottles of Burgundy (both red and white) and life still goes on in capital letters. Blowers has always been and continues to be outrageous and irresistible fun!