Famous Cricketers No 95 - P.A.Perrin

above. When he did play, his performances were not often successful. He was perhaps, therefore, just behind the best. Taken over the whole of his career, his performances against the strongest sides seem to confirm this. For example his batting average against Australian touring sides was 27.19, nine short of his career figure; and against Yorkshire it was only 19.34. Shortly after the First World War, he thus acquired the title ‘the best English batsman who never played Test cricket’, with the earliest reference in print being made by R.O.Edwards in The Cricketer in September 1922. Perrin batted for Essex at third in the order with great regularity from 1896 until mid-June 1912, when he moved down to four, making way for C.A.G.Russell, a local Leyton player who went on to play for England. In those years, Perrin batted at three for Essex on 497 out of 551 possible innings, and was the county’s leading run scorer in eleven of the seventeen seasons. Over the whole period he scored just over 15% of all the runs obtained by Essex in the Championship. In short he was, in those years, the ‘engine room’ of the club’s batting, a position held by a professional in most counties. From 1913 onwards his rôle in the Essex side became more defensive and Press reports of his defending skills more frequent. The years of the Great War excepted, he played as the regular number four from June 1912 until July 1922, when he moved to five, initially to accommodate C.T.Ashton, who played for the county after the end of the Cambridge University term. He usually batted fifth from 1923 to 1925, but when he captained the side at the beginning of 1926, he usually put himself sixth in the order. He played occasional games, sometimes as captain, in 1927 and 1928, when he was past his fiftieth birthday, when Essex should instead have been giving trials to promising younger players. The end of his career with Essex was not marked by any public recognition, possibly because he wanted it that way. Charles McGahey When Perrin started to play first-class cricket in 1896, he acquired another ‘older brother’, an addition to Frederick who had guided him through club cricket. He was Charles Percy McGahey, five years older than Perrin, and like him an amateur from an ordinary East London background, who had already established himself in the Essex side as a middle-order batsman. Perrin persuaded McGahey to play for his Tottenham club from time to time from 1896 to 1903, and sometimes Perrin played for McGahey’s Leyton club. In his contribution to McGahey’s obituary in the 1936 Wisden , Perrin said he had received much encouragement and advice from McGahey when he first played for Essex. Early in Perrin’s career, the county’s scorer, J.W.Armour, had referred to them as the ‘Essex twins’, because they were both tall, hard-hitting batsmen, and he was sometimes unable to distinguish between them. The pair played together regularly for Essex from 1896 to 1913 and again in 1920, achieving twenty-five century partnerships, including new county records of 323 for the third wicket in 1900 and 205 for the sixth wicket in 1906. McGahey and Perrin became close friends, despite their differences in temperament and, later, in wealth. McGahey was the first witness on Perrin’s marriage certificate and was presumably his best man at the wedding. Jan Kemp, in her book on McGahey, Cheerful Charlie , reported that they frequently travelled together to matches. McGahey regularly protested that it was always he, rather than Perrin, who paid their fares on the tram. McGahey was a regular visitor to the Perrin household, often for Sunday lunch: there was more to their friendship than McGahey liking a drink and Perrin owning a pub. Batting As a batsman, Perrin made good use of his height and strength. One of the clearer contemporary descriptions is that by G.W.Beldam alongside the Chevallier Taylor drawing of him published in 1905. This says ‘He is very strongly built and has an exceedingly fine pair of wrists: he gets distinct leverage of the bat from his wrists, which makes his strokes look as though they were played with no effort at all.’ Maybe some of his strength came from moving barrels about in the cellars of The Bull. J.M.Hutchison, who fielded in the covers for Derbyshire in his Chesterfield innings, reported that 10