Famous Cricketers No 95 - P.A.Perrin

they selected G.O.B.Allen, as a fast bowler, to replace Harold Larwood, who had reported an injury. Allen did not let them down: batting at nine, he scored a century. Most of Perrin’s service as selector was under the markedly patrician chairmanships of Sir Pelham Warner, Lord Hawke and Sir Stanley Jackson, whose playing careers were well behind them. Warner wrote in Cricket between Two Wars , published in 1942, that after the 1938 season he thought he ‘should make way for a younger man’ to chair the selectors, and ‘Perrin was appointed in my place.’ When Warner retired he was 64, and Perrin was 63 during the 1939 season: Warner may thus have intended to indicate some surprise at Perrin’s appointment to the post. From the restart of his selecting career Perrin was involved in difficult decisions about the captaincy of the England side and its personnel, for by then selection had become an issue of national interest. In 1931, the selectors appointed D.R.Jardine, who seems to have been sponsored originally by P.F.Warner, as the England captain against New Zealand, despite his inexperience in this role, and they continued with him through 1932 and into the bodyline series in Australia in 1932-33, which England won 4-1. Nothing has survived of Perrin’s views on bodyline, but it is probable that he thought of Jardine, at least initially, as a fellow Spartan. There is no evidence, however, that Perrin had a hand in the development of bodyline. After Marylebone shifted its view about the ethics of bodyline during 1933, Perrin remained as a selector, presumably because of the continuing reliability of his judgment about players. Jardine, for example, told R.E.S.Wyatt, his successor as England captain, that Perrin was ‘staunch and sound.’ Among the players selected by Perrin would have been three Essex fast bowlers, Kenneth Farnes, M.S.Nichols and H.D.Read, who all opened the England bowling in 1934 and 1935, when Larwood and Voce were either unavailable or unselectable. Farnes and Nichols were both players who had been found or ‘brought on’ at Essex through Perrin’s recommendations. He also found George Emmett while on his selector’s travels, but could not persuade him to join Essex. When he became chairman in 1939, his colleagues were all current, successful county captains. These were A.B.Sellers of Yorkshire and M.J.L.Turnbull of Glamorgan, who had been on the committee for one year, and A.J.Holmes of Sussex, in his first season as a selector. Unlike the committees earlier in the thirties, they would all have been very well informed from close range about current players, and Perrin’s role would have changed from supplier of important pieces of well-judged information to mediator. England won the three match series against West Indies by one match to nil. However, the committee, all batsmen, was strongly criticised for its indecision about the bowlers. For example, they left out W.H.Copson for the third Test after his successful introduction earlier in the season, and unaccountably brought in T.W.J.Goddard and M.S.Nichols who had both last played Test cricket some years earlier, to replace W.E.Bowes and Hedley Verity, who brought the Championship to Yorkshire, and finished the season at first and second place in the national averages. As though to underscore Perrin’s old playing weakness, the side also fielded ‘poorly’ in the match, according to Wisden . Norfolk Perrin and his wife, Ethel, moved from Muswell Hill to Waterside Cottage in the Norfolk village of Hickling in 1939. This was a place well away from the war-time dangers of the big cities, which enabled him to pursue his interest in birdwatching, and his other country pursuits, particularly fishing and duck-shooting, which he had followed even as a young man. They had owned the house since the 1920s, using it as a second home: it was formed from two Victorian marshmen’s cottages and overlooks Hickling Broad, now designated as an area of international nature conservation importance. The couple are remembered by local people as wealthy and slightly distant, but with an ability to get on with people from all walks of life. Their son Meredith, who in 1938 had married Yvonne Earle, the daughter of a United States Army general who lived next door at Muswell Hill, and later herself a well-known children’s book author and illustrator, also moved to Hickling during the War. He was a stockbroker but was later able to lead a leisurely country gentleman’s existence. The 18