Famous Cricketers No 95 - P.A.Perrin

Perrin reported his height as 6ft 3in (1.91m), and his weight, in 1901 aged 24, as ‘fourteen stone and a half’ (91.4kg). This would give him, in modern terminology, a Body Mass Index of 25.05, which experts would consider overweight. As he got older, he would have become no lighter. Indeed in 1999, one respondent to a local Oral History Society study of the Leyton ground, recalling him in the 1920s, said simply that he was ‘fat’. Most reporting suggests that he fielded regularly at either gully or point. If he failed to catch or stop a shot in those positions his slowness, resembling reluctance, in turning and chasing the ball, would become immediately evident. He became self-deprecatory about it in later life, ‘recalling’ that the batsmen once ‘ran eight’ when he fetched the ball from the Vauxhall end at The Oval. It is probable that his slowness as a fielder materially lessened his case to be an England Test player and Essex captain. Captaincy Perrin captained Essex in only twenty-eight of his 525 appearances for the county. It is odd that he should so rarely have led the side. He was an amateur and therefore eligible for the task under the code of the time. He was a successful businessman who would have assimilated some of the relevant management techniques. He was later thought to have such great expertise as an assessor of the higher skills of first-class cricketers that he was made a Test selector, so it is likely that he would have been quick at recognising batsmen’s weaknesses and adopting tactics to exploit them. All but two of the matches where he led Essex were after the Great War, by which time he could be accounted a very experienced player. In 1926 he was formally appointed deputy-captain and led the side in fifteen matches at the start of the season when the appointed captain, J.W.H.T.Douglas, was recovering from an appendix operation. He also captained Essex when Douglas was missing from occasional matches in 1927 and 1928, when it seems that the committee were unwilling to interfere with the hegemony that Douglas had established within the club. Perrin’s record in his 28 games as captain was six won, six lost, one tied and fifteen drawn: this return was above ‘par’ for Essex sides of the time. It is possible that he also captained Essex in a handful of matches in 1921 when he was the most senior amateur playing, but scorebooks and Press reports omit the relevant details. There were three occasions when he might have taken up the county’s captaincy. The first arose when F.L.Fane stepped down after the 1906 season and preference was given to C.P.McGahey. McGahey’s position was anomalous in that, although an ‘amateur’ he was an employee of the club, and therefore lacked the degree of ‘independence’ said to be an important attribute of the amateur captain. However he was five years older than Perrin, had played in Test and other representative cricket, and had been a Wisden Cricketer of the Year in 1902. Moreover, as befitted a good soccer player, he was a rather better fielder at a time when the county’s Annual Report regularly expressed concern about the team’s lack of energy in the field. He had also captained the Essex side in eight matches between 1904 and 1906, mostly against the ‘Big Six’ counties in the Championship. His cheerful sociability contrasted with Perrin’s taciturnity, and this would probably have suggested that he had more readily evident leadership skills. Perrin seems to have been given a trial as captain in July 1905 when he led the side against Warwickshire at Edgbaston, when Fane was absent. In that match Warwickshire won by eight wickets after they had ‘got away’ on the second day, scoring some 350 runs in about 100 overs. When Fane missed three further matches later in the season, McGahey rather than Perrin led the side. The second occasion when Perrin might have led Essex occurred after the 1910 season when McGahey, now 39, resigned as the county’s captain. This left Perrin, aged 34, who had by then played 280 matches for the county and heavily committed to the club, as the obvious ‘Buggins turn’ replacement. It is clear that Perrin had expected to be handed the captaincy. He had been one of the players shortlisted as captain before the 1910 season when McGahey had wanted to give up the job at that time. He had also been the only player, apart from McGahey, on the club’s four man selection committee for the 1910 season, a position that could be construed as ‘captain-in-waiting’. However, the club’s committee apparently did not want him for the job. Perrin had captained the county in their rain affected match in mid-August with Yorkshire at Harrogate, after missing four matches through 14