Gubby Under Pressure

Acknowledgements First of all I must thank the staff of the Mitchell Division of the State Library of New South Wales for their assistance, in particular Jennifer Broomhead, the Intellectual Property and Copyright Librarian. My thanks also to Bromley Public Library in providing the facilities for me to read and print copies of the Allen letters from microfilm provided by the Mitchell Library. I must also record my gratitude to Glenys Williams, archivist of the Lord’s Museum and Library, for giving me access to the minutes of meetings of the Cricket Selection sub-Committee of Marylebone Cricket Club during 1936 and 1937, and Gubby Allen’s personal scrapbooks for his 1936/37 tour of Australia, New Zealand, California, the Grand Canyon, Washington and New York. Thanks are due as well to Hunters, solicitors and executors of the Allen estate for obtaining and supplying names and addresses of the residuary beneficiaries of that estate whose permission was required to allow transcriptions and publication of the Allen letters in full. Most important of all, I must thank the residuary beneficiaries themselves who agreed that I could proceed with publication: these were MCC, the Association of Cricket Umpires and Scorers, Alastair Peebles, Jonathan Wyatt, Mrs Iris Saunders, the trustees of Lady Dickson, and members of the Allen family. Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders. If there have been any omissions the publisher would be happy to acknowledge them in any future edition. Only a handful of books covering the 1936/37 MCC tour of Australia and New Zealand have been previously published. Three of the British journalists who travelled to Australia to report the tour for their respective newspapers in the United Kingdom produced books after returning to England in 1937, and they have been invaluable to my research, thanks to an unrestricted loan from the library of the Cricket Society. They were, in no particular order, 1937 Australian Test Tour by Bruce Harris; Australian Summer by Neville Cardus; and So This Is Australia by William Pollock. Three years later, Ken Farnes, one of the players in the MCC party devoted a substantial section of his book, Tours and Tests, to his experiences in 1936/37. Another player on the tour, Bob Wyatt, also had some interesting points to make in his autobiography, Three Straight Sticks in 1951. Nothing else appeared until 1985, when E.W.Swanton produced his comprehensive biography, Gubby Allen: Man of Cricket , which naturally contained considerable coverage of Allen’s achievements as England’s captain during the 1936/37 tour, including some selective quotations from Allen’s letters. The only other book to include comprehensive details was published in 1990, in which Anthony Meredith covered four England tours of Australia under Jim Lillywhite, PlumWarner, Gubby Allen and Mike Brearley in his Summers in Winter . I must record my gratitude to those authors and publishers for their contribution to the history of the MCC tour of Australia and New Zealand in 1936/37. 105