Johnny Leach obituary

English table tennis champion with a huge influence on his sport
Johnny Leach.
Johnny Leach held sway during the 1950s and 60s when table tennis was one of Britain's most popular sports. Photograph: S&G and Barratts/Empics

For many years Johnny Leach, who has died aged 91, was synonymous with English table tennis. Both in his prime as a player, in the immediate postwar years, and subsequently as an ambassador, promoter, administrator, businessman and talent-spotter, his impact on the sport was immense. Leach held sway in an age when table tennis could claim to be the most popular participation sport in the UK. It was played everywhere: youth clubs and youth hostels, working men's clubs, works canteens, church halls and of course homes. If you could not afford the folding table from Woolworths, you simply bought the net and stretched it across the kitchen table.

Throughout the 1950s and 60s, the sport had a heady time of it. Chester Barnes, the controversial genius of the sport, and one of the players discovered by Leach's talent programme, recalled playing at the Wembley Arena in front of crowds of 10,000. "When Johnny was at his peak, they even had an act at the London Palladium. You couldn't imagine that now, could you?" said Barnes.

Born in Bow, in the East End of London, and brought up in Dagenham, Essex, Johnny was the son of Emma and her husband Jim, a manager at British Ropes, south of the Thames in Woolwich. Johnny played on the table in the works canteen there and set about pursuing junior titles, with his father's encouragement, at the age of 17, making him something of a late starter for the sport.

By that time, the second world war was under way, and he served with the Royal Air Force in Northern Ireland. With the serendipity that can shape a career, Leach discovered two international players, Jack Carrington and Ron Crayden, who were also stationed there, and they practised together. Leach maintained that he did not know how good he was until competition proper resumed after hostilities ceased.

The war had inadvertently bolstered English table tennis, with the arrival of the players Victor Barna and Richard Bergmann, from Hungary and Austria respectively. Both had been world champions in the 30s, and while in 1946 Barna was approaching the veteran stage, Bergmann, a brilliant defensive player, was at his peak. By 1947, Leach was in the mix too, reaching the semi-final of the world championships in Paris. The next four years were the halcyon days of English table tennis.

Bergmann won the world title at Wembley in 1948; Leach won the title in Stockholm the following year (to become only the second homegrown British world champion after Fred Perry in 1929); and then it was back to Bergmann in 1950, and Leach for his second title in 1951. Gaumont British News filmed Leach's arrival home from those championships in Stockholm, stepping down from a KLM Dakota with fellow world champions Diane and Rosalind Rowe, the twins who won the women's doubles. The scene was shown in cinemas across the country.

Though it seemed unlikely at the time, for Leach was only 28, that would be his last individual world title and the last by an English player. Twelve months later in Bombay, the Japanese player Hiroji Satoh opened his bat case and changed the sport forever. His thick sponge-covered bat used with a penholder grip imparted so much spin on the ball, and was so quiet, that the hard-bat players, with their pimpled rubber on wood, were no match. Satoh, in his first world championship, became Japan's first world champion in any sport.

Leach tried the new bats, but could not get on with them. Nevertheless, he had an illustrious swansong, winning the Swaythling Cup, the world team championship, in 1953 with Bergmann also in the team, and he would continue to compete internationally until 1959 and nationally until 1965, winning his last crown in the men's doubles at the national championships in 1964 with David Creamer.

Leach was not only a player. Involved with almost every aspect of the sport, he became a vice-president of the English Table Tennis Association, now Table Tennis England (1964), and then president (1988-2011); he had a job with the table tennis manufacturers SW Hancock, a company he would later buy; and in the 1960s he established an ambitious talent-spotting programme with Butlins holiday camps, which discovered more than 50 international players.

He was appointed MBE in 1966, and his reputation preceded him everywhere he went. "He had respect all over the world. As soon as people knew that Johnny was coming with you, you had the best treatment, the best hotels,the best everything," said Barnes.

Leach married his wife, Daisy, in 1946. She died in 2009, as did a son, John, last year. He is survived by another son, Jeff, two granddaughters and two grandsons.

John Alfred Leach, table tennis player and entrepreneur, born 20 November 1922; died 5 June 2014