Famous Cricketers No 95 - P.A.Perrin

Perrin ‘hit the ball hard without a lot of effort’. The Wisden notice of his selection as a Cricketer of the Year in 1905 says that ‘in watching him, one is more conscious of style than of strength.’ Style, particularly in amateurs, was much admired in Edwardian cricket, even when its possessor had not reached it via the conventional route of public school and University cricket. Perrin himself told W.A.Bettesworth that his ‘idea of perfect style’ was that shown by the Essex batsman, A.P.Lucas, of Uppingham and Cambridge, whom he thought ‘absolutely graceful’. Perrin was best known as a batsman who, off faster bowlers, drove the ball ‘with force and sureness of aim and with unvarying decisiveness’ according to the then Manchester Guardian . P.F.Warner, writing of Perrin in 1934, said that ‘No one ever played fast bowling better’: he also accounted his back play as ‘superb’ and this enabled him ‘to play the fastest bowlers . . . with ease.’ E.H.D.Sewell, writing in 1946, included him in a list of players who were particularly strong on the off-side. Writing in 1931 though, he said he had also made hundreds of runs off the leg stump ‘by placing the ball in the short-leg area.’ Detailed match reports make it clear that pulling and cutting were part of his regular repertoire . It should not be thought that Perrin was a ‘dashing’ batsman in the classical amateur mould. It is correct that statistics indicate that he was liable to be dismissed by fast bowlers for low scores more often than the best of his contemporaries, suggesting that he attacked the bowling too early. However there are plenty of references to Perrin being ‘cautious’ or ‘deliberate’. After the Great War, when his aggression was less, he was rather less liable to be bowled than before it. H.W.Lee accounted him one of the ‘great unbowlables’, though Perrin’s figures do not put him in the same ‘unbowlable’ class as Geoffrey Boycott. Perrin seems to have been less proficient against spin. Sewell thought he there was ‘a flaw . . . in his otherwise correct armour’ in dealing with the leg-break on the leg stump. James Thorpe, the author and cartoonist, who played club cricket with and against him for Leyton C.C., writing in 1929, reported that often he ‘followed the turning ball and played it’ from the crease. The figures later in this book do not, however, particularly support the theory that he was weak against the leg-break. Sir Home Gordon suggested in his obituary in The Cricketer that Perrin told him that he had the greatest difficulty against slow left arm bowlers, with Colin Blythe ‘being the most difficult of the lot.’ The figures later on show that left arm bowlers regularly got his wicket, but not overly so. However, the top four in the list of bowlers who obtained his wicket were all left armers. Chesterfield The highest peak of Perrin’s cricket achievements, and the source of most of his fame was his innings of 343 not out against Derbyshire at Queen’s Park, Chesterfield in July 1904. Essex contrived to lose this fixture and Perrin’s personal best has remained the highest first-class score obtained by a batsman on a losing side. Since 1904, three other players on losing sides in first-class matches have scored triple centuries. The Chesterfield match was the thirteenth Championship match to be played on the ground since its first in 1898. The ground had a reputation of providing an excellent batting surface in fine weather, particularly on the first day. J.T. Brown (300) and John Tunnicliffe (243), of Yorkshire had set a world record first-class first wicket partnership of 554 there in August 1898. On the other hand Derbyshire had been tumbled out for just 32 by Nottinghamshire on the ground only three weeks before their Essex match. The match took place after a fortnight of warm weather, which had produced a hard pitch which allowed some lateral movement from the new ball. The outfield, commentators agreed, was ‘like glass’; This, combined with fairly short boundaries, of about 40 m, behind the wickets and a slight slope down towards the lake end of the ground, created conditions which favoured batsmen like Perrin, with a propensity to drive. Temperatures of 84 deg F (29 deg C) were reported in the East Midlands on the first day of the match. 11