Famous Cricketers No 95 - P.A.Perrin

couple had two children, Michael born in 1941 and Marilyn born in 1943, who would have brightened their grandfather’s last years. They both now live in Australia. At Hickling, the Perrins were friendly with members of the Vincent family, who were celebrated keepers and ornithologists, and with Lord Desborough with whom Percy shared shooting facilities. Desborough was a remarkable man, twenty years older than Perrin. In his younger days he had been a sporting ‘polymath’. Later he was a Member of Parliament; chairing the committee which organised the 1908 London Olympics, presiding over the MCC in 1911 although he had not played first-class cricket, and in the Great War establishing the then equivalent of the Home Guard. From time to time members of the Royal family visited the shoot based at Whiteslea Lodge in Hickling, and in their turn Desborough and Perrin visited Sandringham. Sadly, Perrin was ill for the last two or three years of his life, and Sir Home Gordon reported in his Cricketer obituary his ‘profound depression’ because of the pain involved. The MCC set up a committee under Sir Stanley Jackson in November 1943 to draw up a ‘Post-War County Cricket Plan’. This committee included almost all the Test selectors from the 1930s, and it seems likely that Perrin’s illness prevented him from taking part. He died at home, in his seventieth year, on 20 November 1945 on the first day of the Nuremberg trials. His death certificate gave ‘hypostatic pneumonia’ and ‘arterio-sclerosis of the cerebral arteries’ as the causes of his death. The first of these conditions suggests he may have been inactive for some while. The second would perhaps be connected with his life-long smoking habit and time spent in smoky public houses. His funeral was held at the Horsham St Faiths crematorium, just outside Norwich on 26 November 1945, and his ashes were later scattered at Lord’s. His death was reported briefly in several national newspapers. Because of newsprint rationing, these obituaries were necessarily rather terse. The Leytonstone Express and Independent was as terse as the nationals, but it headlined the report simply ‘One of the great Essex batsmen’. In its straightforward way it accurately describes Perrin in terms he would perhaps have appreciated best. 19