Famous Cricketers No 95 - P.A.Perrin

After the Great War Perrin seems not to have expanded his Tottenham property holdings greatly, although he purchased land in Norfolk. However, the sale and rental particularly of housing, along with returns from shrewd investments on the Stock Exchange, provided him with an income sufficient to buy in 1931 a new Rolls-Royce 20/25 registration number GPS 18. He sold it to a well-known ‘psychic researcher’ of the time, Harry Price, and replaced it with another in 1936, this time a 25/30. Both cars were priced at about £1,800. E.W.Swanton reported in Follow On that Perrin was not known to own a car, so presumably he never took either of them to Lord’s: he seems not to have driven himself. Rolls-Royce records show that a dozen other first-class cricketers purchased 20/25s, including Woolf Barnato, Sir Julien Cahn, Lord Cornwallis and the Maharajah of Patiala, putting him among wealthy company. Despite the various adverse effects of the Second World War on property and business generally, the gross value estate of Perrin’s estate at his death in 1945 was £184,000, equivalent to over £5 million at 2006 prices. Perrin in club cricket Perrin started to play club cricket at the age of sixteen for Tottenham Cricket Club, playing in eight matches in 1892 alongside brother Frederick, who was one of its leading members. At that time Tottenham was a substantial club, founded in 1871, with some two hundred members, fielding two or three elevens on most Saturdays, from their home ground, Downhills, off Philip Lane. The club’s first eleven played about twenty-five single innings friendly matches in a season, including Bank Holiday matches, occasional weekday games and a tour to a seaside county. In some seasons they played the MCC. Their opponents were mainly similar clubs in North London or Metropolitan Essex, such as Clapton, Edmonton, Walthamstow Town and Ilford, organisations which, unlike Tottenham, have mostly continued to function. Perrin played in most of Tottenham’s first eleven matches in 1893, 1894 and 1895, scoring his first century for them in 1894. James Lillywhite’s Cricketers’ Annual reported that he was the top scorer with 51, opening for Tottenham in their match against the Gentlemen of Holland touring side in August 1894. Earlier in the season, in May, he played one match for Middlesex Second XI against Kent Second XI: batting at seven he scored 1 and 5. In 1895, when he was nineteen, he scored 1,111 runs for Tottenham in the season, setting a new club record in a year when the club undertook a tour of Holland, reciprocating the Dutch visit of 1894. After he started to play for Essex, Perrin often played for Tottenham, appearing in fifteen matches or so in each of the seasons 1896, 1897 and 1898: in 1897 he scored four centuries for the club. He received several awards for his performances for Tottenham, which are now in his grandson’s possession. He played with less frequency from 1899 after he took over operations at The Bull, although he sometimes played for the North Thames Licensed Victuallers’ side. After 1902 he played only occasionally for the Tottenham club until it ceased operations at the end of the 1907 season when its ground was sold for housing. The Tottenham and Edmonton Weekly Herald records the club’s batting and bowling averages for each of the seasons from 1892 to 1903: over those twelve seasons he played about 180 first team matches, scoring 6,427 runs at a good average of 51.41, and taking 130 wickets. From 1896 onwards, Perrin played a handful of matches each season for the Essex ‘Club and Ground’ side, appearing rather more regularly for them after the closure of the Tottenham club. Sir Home Gordon reported that in 1899 Perrin scored 209* against Wanstead and 205* against a Leyton club, Beaumont, in consecutive matches for the side. Kenneth Farnes’ diary reported how in 1929, Perrin spoke to him after a Club and Ground match with Gidea Park at Romford. The outcome was an invitation to play for the county later in the season, which Farnes was unable to accept because his employer, a bank, would not allow him leave. Eventually Farnes left the bank job, which he hated, played for Essex, then Cambridge University and England: Farnes thought Perrin ‘had taken on the role of fairy godmother’. Perrin played for the Club and Ground side until the mid 1930s, in later years often as captain: at this level he seems to have found batting easy until he was almost sixty. 7