Famous Cricketers No 95 - P.A.Perrin

Ethel Perrin Percy married Ethel Mary Webb, the daughter of a wine merchant, at St James’ Church, Muswell Hill on 3 April 1901: she was 22 at the time of the wedding. Ethel was born at 11 Summerhill Road, Tottenham, later moving to a larger semi-detached house in West Green Road, both close to the Tottenham Cricket Club ground. The witnesses on the certificate are C.P.McGahey and Frederick Perrin. There are some odd discrepancies between the marriage certificate and the 1901 Census which was taken three days earlier. The certificate says that Percy’s address was 36 Princes Avenue, Muswell Hill and Ethel’s address was 69 Manor Road, Stoke Newington. However the Census recorded Percy living at Manor Road with his mother, and Ethel staying as a visitor at 194 Muswell Hill Road, along with a younger sister. Perrin’s brother Frederick lived at 36 Princes Avenue according to the Census. After their wedding, which was not reported in local newspapers, the Perrins lived at 194 Muswell Hill Road, a very large end of terrace red brick house, almost new at the time, where their neighbours were mainly from the ‘professional classes’, often with two or three live-in domestic staff. The Perrins continued to live at this address until 1939, according to the electoral registers. They had one child, Percival Meredith, usually known by the latter name, who was born on 14 November 1902 at 194 Muswell Hill Road. Perrin in business After leaving school in 1893, Perrin presumably assisted his mother and his brother in running their public house and property businesses, ‘learning the ropes’. His mother ceased to be the licensee of The Bull in 1899: she is recorded in the 1901 Census as a retired publican. Percy himself ran the public house business at The Bull from 1899 until 1913, and organised it so that it would allow him to play for Essex on some seventy days or so over the four summer months, and in club cricket. It is likely that relatives ‘filled in’ for him, at least in his early days as licensee. No doubt Perrin’s presence, as a cricketer of more than local celebrity, helped turnover at the tills. After his mother died at his Muswell Hill house in October 1908, Percy inherited the greater part of the property estate left by his father, including the White Hart and its adjoining houses which by then had been rebuilt. (In the 1980s the White Hart was well-known for its entertainments: one of its more interesting performers was Fred White, ‘the lorry driver in a frock.’) The estate appears not to have been shared out equally between the Perrin brothers, presumably because Frederick’s businesses had been so successful that he had already retired. Percy Perrin rebuilt some of the properties which he inherited. In 1910 with John Robson, a builder who lived in a large house close to The Bull, he purchased some 350 houses in South Tottenham from the Northern and Eastern Suburban Dwelling Co Ltd. These properties and other holdings seems not to have been managed by estate agents but were controlled directly from an office in Spencer Road, Tottenham. By 1913 the scale of activity required and the returns involved were such that Perrin gave up the tenancy of The Bull. Indeed the property business was so successful that in June 1913, he purchased a new Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost, registration number R2508, with a landaulette body, coachbuilt by the firm of Angus, Sanderson for £1,350, equivalent to £50,000 at 2006 prices. The ‘sound commercial education’ was paying off. Later Robson and Perrin had a residential estate agency with several branch offices in North London. At one time they had an office in Wigmore Street in Marylebone. Perrin, who was 38 in 1914, did not serve in the armed forces during the Great War. His name is notably missing from the lists attached to the Essex club’s annual reports during the war years, describing the military and similar activities of the club’s players and staff. It would appear that his main activity during the war years was the management of his property, although it is possible that he was a special constable. The Rolls-Royce was requisitioned by the War Office: fitted with a new body, it was used in France by the Army’s Director of Transport, Sir Eric Geddes, later of ‘axe’ fame. 6