John Woodcock (cricket writer)
English cricket writer for The Times (1926-2021)
John Charles Woodcock OBE (7 August 1926 – 18 July 2021) was an English cricket writer and journalist. He was the cricket correspondent for The Times from 1954 until 1987.
Early life
Woodcock was born in Longparish, Hampshire on 7 August 1926, the second son of the Reverend Parry Woodcock and his (much younger) wife Nora Dunsford (née Hutchinson). Since 1906 his father had been rector of Longparish, where the Woodcock family held the right of advowson. Woodcock was born in the rectory when his father was 70. His grandfather had been born in 1813, two years before the Battle of Waterloo.
His family relocated from Longparish after his father retired in 1933. Woodcock completed his primary education at the Dragon School. As a child, he was a good angler before moving onto cricket while attending St Edward's School, Oxford. When he was fifteen, he almost died from septic arthritis.
The public source identifies “John Woodcock (cricket writer)” as english cricket writer for The Times (1926-2021). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around John, Woodcock and cricket.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6264800. VIAF identifies the subject as 93515612. The Library of Congress control number is nb2017014626. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1926, 2021, 1954 and 1987.
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This entry incorporates text from “John Woodcock (cricket writer)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.