Christopher Martin-Jenkins
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Christopher Dennis Alexander Martin-Jenkins, known as CMJ (born 20 January 1945, Oxford), is a cricket journalist and commentator for Test Match Special (TMS) on BBC Radio 4.
Martin-Jenkins was a student at Marlborough, and then Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. He joined the TMS team in 1973, aged 28. While captain of cricket at his school, Marlborough, 11 years earlier, Martin-Jenkins wrote to Brian Johnston asking him how to become a cricket commentator.
At various times, Martin-Jenkins has been cricket correspondent for the BBC (1973-1980, 1985-1991), the Daily Telegraph (1990-1999) and The Times (1999-2008). Mike Atherton replaced him as The Times' Chief Cricket Correspondent on May 1, 2008; CMJ was to continue contributing to The Times' cricket pages. He was also a commentator on BBC television for their cricket coverage between 1981 and 1985, before returning to radio. His journalistic talents were encouraged by EW Swanton, joining the Cricketer magazine as his assistant editor. From there he joined the BBC Sports News department and was appointed cricket correspondent in succession to Brian Johnston in 1973. He was also editor of The Cricketer from 1980 and President of The Cricket Society (1998-2008). As a player, he made 99 for Marlborough against Rugby School at Lord's and was later in the Surrey second XI.
He is the author of The Complete Who's Who of Test Cricketers.
Martin-Jenkins has also been known as "Jenkers" (see Test Match Special, Peter Baxter (ed, 1981); see also Oxford '-er'). There are suggestions in The Alderman's Tale (1991), the memoir of fellow commentator, Don Mosey (1924-99), that Martin-Jenkins' presence in the commentary box was an occasional source of friction to some of his colleagues (though equally Mosey seems to have had a chip on his shoulder regarding the operation of what he saw as an old boy network within the BBC).
Martin-Jenkins is a strong and some say blinkered supporter of public schools, viz his comments in his 2007 Cowdrey lecture:
"The consequence is that young people are getting an increasingly contracted, one-tracked view of sporting life and also that those who want a decently written report on a county match, or, even in the small print, to know the scores in - say- The Cricketer Cup, the Walker Cup, the President’s Putter or the Queen Elizabeth Cup at Henley, are increasingly in danger of not being able to get them."
The Cricketer Cup is a competition only open to old boys of public schools, the President's Putter only open to graduates of Oxford or Cambridge Universities and the Queen Elizabeth Cup only to current students of public schools.
Martin-Jenkins' son, Robin Martin-Jenkins, plays county cricket for Sussex.
