Gubby Under Pressure

Chapter Five The assessment Allen’s assessment of previous English captains in Australia To emphasise his argument that an English captain on tour in Australia faced such unacceptable pressures and demands off the field that they affected his playing performance, Allen repeated it in four separate letters. And he did not waste any time either, as it appears in his very first letter after arriving in Australia and being asked to make a few speeches in Perth. Writing on 17 October, 1936 he declared: ‘Now I know why all English captains fail at cricket in Australia.’ This was after only one match in which he had not had to bat and bowled only 14 eight-ball overs spread over two innings. He returned to the theme immediately, in his next letter dated 26 October, but narrowed his examples to those of the last sixteen years only. ‘I am sure the reason why every English captain out here has failed at cricket since the war is because he has been worked too hard.’ It was nearly three months later, and after the loss of the Third Test, that Allen resurrected his theory, writing on 16 January: ‘There is no doubt that being captain of a touring team out here is pretty hard work and I am not surprised that so many of the captains since the war have failed as cricketers.’ Once again he has reduced his examples, this time from ‘every English captain’ to only ‘many of the captains.’ But on 28 February, with defeat facing England in the final Test and no chance of regaining the Ashes, Allen makes no exceptions by writing: ‘No English captain since the war has succeeded at cricket in Australia.’ Allen never names the captains in his letters and I had assumed that he was referring to those leading teams in pursuit of the Ashes like himself. These were Douglas in 1920/21, Gilligan in 1924/25, Chapman in 1928/29 and Jardine in 1932/33. It was a surprise, therefore, to learn from Swanton that in his official report to MCC, Allen had omitted Douglas and included Errol Holmes, the leader of the short non-series tour of 1935/36. To do so he had refined his selections again, from ‘English captain’ to ‘captain of an MCC touring team’. When reporting on his dissatisfaction with the excessive number of official functions that such a captain must attend, Allen wrote: ‘I am convinced that a captain of an MCC touring team in Australia has little chance of doing himself full justice as a cricketer on the field, as things stand at present. The cricketing performances of Gilligan, Chapman, Jardine and Holmes, the last four MCC captains in Australia, confirm this view.’ Why did Allen want to include Holmes in his list? The 1935/36 tour lasted less than two months in Australia in which only six matches were played, one against each of the state sides, plus a final game against a weak Australian XI, well below Test match standard as nearly all potential members of the Test XI 63