We can thank the legendary Fry for late great O’Connor

CB FRY had so many claims to fame that it’s impossible to squeeze them all into one paragraph. He captained England at football and cricket in between playing rugby for the Barbarians and equalling the world record for the long-jump.

He played in the FA Cup at 16, captained Oxford University at football, athletics and cricket. He would have won a rugby Blue but for an untimely injury, excelled at boxing, golf, swimming, tennis, rowing, skating, throwing the javelin and putting the shot.

Not for nothing, therefore, was he offered the vacant throne as the new King of Albania. A brilliant scholar and parliamentary Liberal candidate, he met Hitler and, as a reminder that madness often comes out of the same stable as genius, tried to convince the foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, that it would be a good idea if Nazi Germany took up Test cricket.

Fry, ‘Almighty’ as they called him at the height of his sporting prowess around the advent of the 20th century, had another claim to fame which had been buried for almost 80 years until its resurrection at St Stephen’s Church in Dulwich last Tuesday. CB Fry put Terry O’Connor on the road to a long and colourful career in sports journalism. In giving him sixpence for his first assignment, Fry would have had no way of knowing that over the next seven decades the rumbustious young fellow would hurl a fair few cats among pigeons the world over, at every Olympiad and on every Lions tour from the Sixties.

On a sweltering afternoon in high summer, O’Connor’s son, Barry, told the story of a chance encounter that took place a short taxi ride away in another corner of south London during the darkest summer of all, in 1939.

“When Dad was 14 he lived just off the Brixton Road near The Oval. He and a mate used to bunk off to watch the cricket sitting on the grass behind the boundary.

“On this particular day they were sitting close to the Press box. A journalist signalled to Dad that he wanted to speak to him. He offered him sixpence if he would run his copy to the telex machines and that man was none other than CB Fry.’’ A tail gunner in the RAF during the final years of the Second World War, O’Connor plunged into newspaper life as soon as he had been demobbed. His stature in rugby can be gauged by the fact that before Clive Rowlands took Wales off to the pioneering World Cup in 1987, he sought the advice of two people – Sir Bobby Robson, then managing the England football team, and Terry O’Connor.

Born in London to Irish parents, the service reflected his Irish heritage, from the Lions version of The Fields of

Athenry to William Butler Yeats’ revered The Cloths of

Heaven and Jackie Evancho’s version of Danny Boy.

O’Connor died in April at the age of 92. As well as Barry, he is also survived by his daughter Coral and grandsons Callum and Finnbarr.