Famous Cricketers No 95 - P.A.Perrin

limited bowling resources and some ponderous fielding, Derbyshire reached 448 for four at the end of the second day’s play, just two short of saving the follow on. Among these four wickets was Ollivierre who had scored 229, his highest first-class score, out of 378 added while he was at the wicket. On the third day, in cooler conditions, Essex took the last six Derbyshire wickets for only eighty runs, securing a first innings lead of forty-nine. In the space of the following fourteen overs, leading up to lunch, Derbyshire reduced Essex to 27 for 6, with some fine fast bowling from Bestwick and Warren and four well-taken catches. These wickets included Perrin, caught and bowled by Warren just after he had scored two leg-side fours. After lunch, E.H.D.Sewell with 41, and Douglas 21, added fifty for the eighth wicket by hitting out. Gillingham was absent with lumbago and had stayed in Nottingham: he was sent for, but arrived just after the Essex innings had finished at 97. The five-hundred run difference between the Essex first innings total, 597, and the second, 97, had been exceeded only twice at that time. Derbyshire were thus left 147 runs to win in 125 minutes. After L.G.Wright was dismissed at 11, Ollivierre and Storer added 138 runs in 27.5 overs to secure a win with twenty minutes to spare. The outcome was described by The Daily Telegraph as ‘the most phenomenal performance ever recorded at the game of cricket’ and by The Times as one of the ‘most remarkable victories ever recorded at cricket.’ Bowling Although he bowled in fifty-eight of his 538 first-class matches, Perrin was of little account in that aspect of the game. His career total of sixteen first-class wickets was achieved at about one wicket for every thirteen overs, and he conceded runs at a rate equivalent to 3.53 runs per six-ball over. He was typically brought on to bowl only when recognised bowlers had failed, and many of his wickets comprised early or middle order batsmen who had been at the wicket for a while. There are few Press references to his bowling and almost none about his methods. His description to W.A. Bettesworth of his first wicket in county cricket suggests a delivery which turned in from the off ‘by two or three inches’ and we should, perhaps, think of him as an off-break bowler. Essex had a good quality, better than ‘occasional’ wrist-spin bowler in McGahey, and it is unlikely that Perrin would have duplicated that particular skill. It is possible that, briefly in 1902, Perrin was thought of as more than a change bowler, and this would have been shortly after F.G.Bull, an off-break bowler with a suspect action, had stopped playing for Essex. Fielding Perrin took 284 catches for Essex in his career: only six Essex players have taken more for the county. There can thus be little doubt that he was a competent catcher, even though Sir Home Gordon unhelpfully under-recorded his career total, in Cricket Form at a Glance , by more than a hundred. P.F.Warner said of his fielding in The Book of Cricket that ‘at short third man or in the gully he brought off many fine catches.’ However, he was simply ‘not active on his feet’, as E.H.D.Sewell gently reported in A Searchlight on English Cricket . Raymond Robertson-Glasgow, who played against him several times in the 1920s, wrote of him in 1948 that ‘A name for inadequacy in the field clung to him like a poisonous plant.’ Charles Bray, who played briefly alongside him for Essex, used the word ‘cumbersome’, and the word ‘passenger’ appears more than once in the same connection. His reputation as a poor fielder was most firmly established by Wisden ’s 1905 notice of him as a Cricketer of the Year, when it said that ‘he seems to lack entirely the born fielder’s power of anticipating the direction of a hit’ and that as regards representative matches, ‘this stands in his way’. The Almanack had more firmly criticised his fielding in earlier seasons, for example alleging that in 1903 he had taken ‘little interest’ in it. Some of his contemporaries, including G.L.Jessop and E.H.D.Sewell, writing later, suggested that criticism of that ferocity was unjustified. 13