John Woodcock, the revered former cricket correspondent at The Times, has died in Hampshire aged 94.

Pilgrims would descend on the thatched Longparish cottage, close to the River Test, where he had lived for more for than 70 years to hear thoughts from his unparalleled memory of cricket dating back to Donald Bradman and beyond.

John was appointed cricket correspondent of The Times in 1954, just in time to board the SS Orsova for what became one of the most fabled of all Ashes tours. It was not, however, his first trip to Australia. Four years earlier he had toured as EW Swanton’s secretary with the task of shooting footage for the BBC. Much of it ended up in the classic film Elusive Victory.

He spent most winters overseas, travelling by ship until air travel became the norm in the mid-1960s. John’s job was simply to report the play – and it’s widely considered that no one in the history of cricket has done it better.

In 1980, John began a stint as editor of Wisden, the cricketers’ almanack. He gave up Wisden after six years and stepped down from the Times in 1988.

Eight years later he was appointed OBE. He kept writing columns, with decreasing frequency but the same skill, and popped up again just after his 93rd birthday to say that Ben Stokes’s match-winning Ashes century at Headingley made him shed tears of joy.