Tony Pawson

Although a member of the Great Britain squad for the 1952 Olympics, Tony Pawson never played in the only game against Luxembourg. However, he was probably the most interesting of the Great Britain squad. A double Oxford football Blue, he won two FA Amateur Cup winners’ medals with the crack Pegasus team in 1951, in the first final to attract a 100,000 spectators to Wembley, and again in 1953. He also won eight England amateur caps and played two games in the Football League for Charlton Athletic and scored the winner on his début against Tottenham Hotspur. But, whilst that is impressive, it was at cricket where Pawson established himself. Also a cricket double Blue, he was a right-handed batsman and played First Class cricket for Oxford University and Kent, from 1946-53, and scored nearly 4,000 First Class runs. Whilst at Winchester College he once scored 237 runs at Lord’s as a 15-year-old.

During World War II Pawson attained the rank of Major in the Rifle Brigade and saw active service in the North African campaign. After the War he was a personnel director at Reed International and also became a distinguished football and cricket writer for the Observer in 1968 and was chairman of the Cricket Writers’ Club in 1980 and 1981. He joined the England fly-fishing team in 1978 and on the River Tormes at Salamanca, Spain in 1984 caught 23 trout to became the first Englishman to win the world fly-fishing title. He was awarded the OBE in 1988 for his services to angling after he campaigned for better access for disabled anglers. His autobiography in 1980 embraced the love of his three sports and he entitled it Runs and Catches. Pawson died in 2012, after his wife Hilarie died the previous year, and his son Anthony, a well known Canadian scientist, died of unspecified causes less than a year after Tony’s death .