Famous Cricketers No 95 - P.A.Perrin

lumbago. The game was drawn, with Essex securing first innings lead, and presumably the committee were unimpressed with Perrin’s approach in what seems to have been a trial of his leadership. In that match Douglas top scored when Essex batted and, brought on late in Yorkshire’s innings, took the wickets of four tail-enders, giving Essex an advantage before rain set in. He thus outperformed Perrin in the game. During the winter the committee first asked C.J.Kortright, also 39, who had last played for Essex four years earlier, without any success, to captain the side in 1911. But at the committee meeting in February 1911 it was reported that Kortright had declined the invitation. Eventually at the meeting of the committee in 28 March 1911, A.P.Lucas proposed, with Kortright seconding, that J.W.H.T.Douglas should be appointed captain, and their motion was approved. Perrin was not a member of the club’s selection committee in 1911. Douglas was by no means an inexperienced cricketer. At the start of the 1911 season he was 28, a regular player for the county for the previous eight seasons, who had been a member of MCC overseas touring sides. Outside cricket he had won the 1908 Olympic middleweight boxing title in a famous bout with R.L.‘Snowy’ Baker of Australia. He was a strong personality who ‘lived hard and to the full’, It is likely that the committee concluded that Douglas’ determination was one which was more likely than Perrin’s diffidence to secure greater endeavour from the Essex side, particularly its fielding. It is possible that some members of the Committee also thought that, although Perrin might be in modern parlance ‘streetwise’, in the same terms ‘a bloke who ran a boozer in Tottenham’ was not quite the captain they wanted, even as a stopgap. The waters of this unsatisfactory episode were muddied in 1939 by the comments of Sir Home Gordon in his book Background of Cricket . Gordon asserted that J.W.H.T.’s father, ‘Old’ John, who had been elected to the Essex committee in May 1909 and who had agreed to take over one of the mortgages on the Leyton ground in the club’s financial crisis in November 1908, said that he would foreclose if his son was not awarded the captaincy. ‘Old’ Douglas was ambitious for his son’s success and was well placed to exercise influence: so the theory fits the facts. Two histories of the Essex county club, one written by Charles Bray in 1950, and the Official History by David Lemmon and Mike Marshall published in 1987, recognised that Douglas rattled his money bags, but both acknowledged that there was unlikely to be documentary evidence which supports this. In his autobiography, Wickets, Catches and the Odd Run , T.E.Bailey said that there was an additional reason for Douglas getting the captain’s job. In the book, he says that Perrin was unwilling to put up the money for the mortgage in 1908, and has confirmed that was the impression of Essex committee members with long memories, when Bailey was the Essex secretary in the 1950s. Perrin may thus have contributed to his own failure to achieve the captaincy, although it is unlikely that he would have been to assist the club in 1908, because much of his family’s wealth was still locked away in a trust whose main beneficiary was his mother. In some respects, the third occasion when Perrin might have taken over the Essex captaincy was even stranger than the second. This occurred when H.M.Morris resigned the post after the 1932 season, after he had played only twice because of the claims of his family’s property and nursery businesses. The Committee meeting in October 1932 noted a report of the Club chairman, C.S.Richardson, that Perrin had been asked to undertake the job, but thought ‘it would not be advisable’ for him to accept the captaincy. Perrin had by then returned to the Test selection committee. Although he still played club cricket, he had last played regular first-class cricket six years before, with little playing success. Had he agreed to ‘turn out’ in 1933, he would perhaps have broken the record set by a Gloucestershire cleric, R.H.Moss, who in 1925 had played his only Championship match, for Worcestershire, some three months past his fifty-seventh birthday. 15