Famous Cricketers No 95 - P.A.Perrin

children of Daisy, Countess of Warwick at her house at Little Easton in Essex. In his autobiography, A Cricket Pro’s Lot , Root said that Perrin tried to persuade him to qualify for the county. He had encouraged M.S.Nichols, when he started as a young professional with Essex, to develop his fast bowling. Lord Hawke, who had chaired the selectors from 1899 to 1911, said in his Recollections and Reminiscences , ghosted by Sir Home Gordon and published in 1924, that ‘Few better judges . . . can be found.’ He was ‘not prone to volunteer his views, but when they are given they are invariably wise and pithily conveyed.’ Hawke thought Perrin would have been ‘a good man on a Selection Board’, even though he had never undertaken military service. In 1926, when he started as a selector, Perrin was still a current player on the county circuit and thus potentially well-informed about current candidates. He missed several Essex matches to carry out his selector’s responsibilities. Oddly though, he was playing for the county at Bristol at the start of the third Test at Leeds and cannot have therefore been involved in the strange decision of the selectors to omit the Gloucestershire left-armer, C.W.L.Parker, who had been called to the ground, even though pitch conditions suited him. In the previous season Perrin had been dismissed twice by Parker in the course of a seventeen-wicket match haul, so it may reasonably be deduced that he thought the omission was mistaken. For the fifth match of the series with Australia at The Oval, the selectors replaced A.W.Carr as captain with A.P.F. Chapman. In his book Cricket with the Lid Off , Carr later implied that Perrin was one of the selectors who had voted for his dismissal. P.F.Warner reported that he was particularly influential in encouraging the return of Wilfred Rhodes, then aged 48, to Test cricket for this game. Perrin had played against him earlier in the season. England won the match, recovering the Ashes: Wisden thought Rhodes’ bowling in this Test match ‘no small factor in determining the issue of the struggle.’ Despite this achievement, there was a cull of selectors, and among others Carr was brought in to select players. Perrin did not return until 1931, by which time the Ashes had been ceded to a side which included the young Donald Bradman. His return coincided with an increase in the influence of Lord Hawke at Lord’s. By the thirties Perrin had the time and the means to undertake his selector’s duties in a particularly conscientious way, and P.F.Warner remarked in The Book of Cricket that ‘he went about the country seeing a great deal of cricket’, as though this was unusual for a selector. Much of this activity was in the company of Sir Home Gordon: their chauffeur was another eccentric, Leslie Hindley, who took them round the country in an open touring car, nicknamed Thelma. (Sometimes Gerry Weigall, the chief eccentric, went along too.) E.W.Swanton described them under the title ‘a few old buffers’ in Follow On , published in 1976, where he told of Perrin speaking in a growl, dropping his aitches. When watching matches at Lord’s they often sat in the upper tier of the pavilion, Perrin from time to time rolling his own cigarettes according to Swanton. Robertson-Glasgow suggested that he usually brought his lunch with him from home. Another eccentric, Major C.H.B.Pridham, described them as ‘the owl, the hind and the homebird’, with Perrin being ‘tall, silent and observant’, having ‘owl-like wisdom’. Among such company, Perrin apparently conducted himself with great discretion, so that at Lord’s and elsewhere his acolytes never quite knew whose skills he had come to assess. On one occasion, according to Gordon, they watched matches at Lord’s, The Oval and Leyton in one day. Charles Bray described Perrin as having a very dry sense of humour, and it is probable he found it all very amusing. One of the main themes of Perrin’s long tenure as a selector in the 1930s was the containment of Australian batsmen, particularly Bradman, and the search for a combination to achieve this was a principal concern even when touring sides were from elsewhere. Of course, very little is known about the deliberations of selectors, so that we are left to guess how they reached their decisions. It is likely that Perrin was the source of a significant share of the information on the current form and aptitudes of players used by the selectors to reach their decisions. As a renowned player of fast bowlers, Perrin was presumably better placed than T.A.Higson, a fellow selector from 1931 to 1937, to judge exponents of that particular art, and batsmen facing them. In 1931 just before the first Test after his return, the selectors had a fine old row with Higson when, unable to contact him in an emergency, 17