Page 296 - They Also Served

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Peter Bromley 1949.
Lionel Peter John Stuart Bromley was
born in Heswall, Cheshire, on 30th April
1929. Educated at Cheltenham College,
he, like so many of his generation, was called up for national service. Selected for a regular commission, he trained at Sandhurst and was in the modern pentathlon team, narrowly missing out on selection for the 1952 Helsinki Olympics. Commissioned into the 14th/20th King’s Hussars on 14th July 1949 and based in Catterick, he took every opportunity to ride, including with the Bedale Hunt over the challenging North Yorkshire terrain. When his regiment was posted to Fleet in Hampshire, he rode out every morning, schooling horses for local trainer Frank Pullen and entered several point-to-point races.
In February 1953, the regiment was posted to Tripoli. Faced with several years in Libya, Bromley resigned his commission. On the eve of his return to the UK, he took part in a high-spirited cycle race around the officers’ mess and collided with a wall. The subsequent concussion meant he missed the flight home, which crashed into the sea en route to Malta. Back in the UK, working as Pullen’s assistant and ultimately hoping to make it as a jockey, he was severely injured at Cheltenham when a horse he was exercising reared up and fell on him. Bromley’s convalescence took a year and, unable to ride competitively, he went for numerous unsuccessful interviews in a quest to become a racing journalist. Indeed, his only income during this time was from backing horses with tips from Pullen. Finally, in 1955, he successfully auditioned for the British Racing Amplifying and Recording Company.
Bromley’s first session as a radio commentator was at Plumpton on 23rd March 1955, where he earned £20 and delivered the immortal line: ‘Atom Bomb has fallen!’ In the late 1950s, he was invited to join the BBC television racing team, initially as an understudy to the legendary Peter O’Sullevan. However, Bromley elected to remain with radio; a wise move as O’Sullevan dominated his field for the next 40 years. In the 1960s, Bromley commentated on 50 races a year, but by the 1980s, this had risen to over 250. His enthusiastic delivery endeared him to generations of listeners, with such gems as: ‘It’s Shergar – and you need a telescope to see the rest!’ ‘Red Rum wins and Crisp is second – and the rest don’t matter – we’ll never see a race like this in a hundred years!’
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