death_date death_place birth_place name birth_date known_for article_title birth_name occupation
30 january 1987 basingstoke , hampshire , england lambeth , london , england johnnie cradock 17 may 1904 cookery johnnie cradock
 john whitby cradock major , british army
johnnie cradock

major john `` johnnie '' whitby cradock -lrb- 17 may 1904 in lambeth , london , england -- 30 january 1987 in basingstoke , hampshire , england -rrb- was a cook , writer and broadcaster and the fourth husband of television cook and writer fanny cradock .
cradock attended harrow school and served in the british army , reaching the rank of major in the royal artillery .
at the age of twenty , he played rugby for beckenham rfc during the 1924/5 season alongside a seventeen-year-old james robertson justice who would later become an actor .
he is best remembered as being the long-suffering stooge for his wife in their popular british cooking programmes which were shown from the 1950s to the 1970s .
wearing a traditional blazer and sporting a monocle above his trademark handlebar moustache , he would remain around the back of fanny 's studio sets awaiting her imperious commands which , when they came , often resulted in him being berated for being too slow .
with his wife , he wrote a number of popular cookery books .
johnnie and fanny also wrote the `` bon viveur '' restaurant column for `` the daily telegraph '' newspaper from 1950 to 1955 .
this was one of britain 's first restaurant columns and led to their first television series in 1955 .
at first they presented the bbc 's `` kitchen magic '' , but were soon poached by itv 's first cooking programme , which they presented as `` fanny & johnnie '' .
at that time johnnie and fanny were not married .
fanny adopted his name for their writing and television work and they eventually married in 1977 .
the marriage was in fact bigamous as fanny was still married to her second husband , and fraudulent as she lied about her age on the marriage certificate .
