Lives in Cricket No 1 - Allan Watkins

In the late 1960s, when Arnold Dyson was due to retire, Michael Mills recalls the bursar’s gloomy prediction. “You’ll never replace a character like Arnold Dyson,” he said. “We can if we try,” Mills replied. A letter was sent to all the county secretaries. By this time the Glamorgan link had been strengthened through Wilfred Wooller sending his two sons to Oundle, where they were in Mills’ house, and it was from Wooller that the most helpful reply came. “Try Allan Watkins,” he suggested. Allan travelled to Oundle for an interview. “Mike, you are quite right,” the bursar said later. Oundle had found a worthy successor to Dyson. “He was an absolute gem,” says Mills, “and of course he was playing in that game when Austin Matthews had spoken to me!” Allan could see that a move to Oundle would be a promotion and bring a better salary. The Framlingham bursar acquiesced, to the disgust of Norman Borrett, the master in charge of cricket. A useful cricketer for Devon, who had made three appearances for Essex, Borrett was more renowned as a hockey international and had a legendary reputation for his ruthlessness on a squash court, where he had been British amateur champion. A born competitor, he was determined that Allan was not going to leave without a fight. “He came up to the house and got hold of his cheque book and opened it. He said, ‘There you are, Allan, sign and put your wages on there. What the school can’t pay, the old boys will make up.’” There had been other compensations at Framlingham, where Allan was regarded as a member of the Common Room. This gave him a schoolmaster’s pension rights, whereas at Oundle he would not be treated as one of the teaching staff, so his pension would suffer. Nevertheless Allan was impressed by the facilities he saw at Oundle and by the eagerness of the school to hire him. Oundle’s cricketing traditions had been reinforced in 1968 with the appointment of Dr Barry Trapnell as headmaster. A good enough cricketer to have won a blue at Cambridge and opened the bowling for the Gentlemen against the Players in 1946, Trapnell had toyed with a longer involvement in the game but, after one match for Middlesex, the captain of the day, R.W.V.Robins, made clear the commitment he expected. Sadly, this clashed with Trapnell’s academic and other aspirations. “One day,” he recalls, “I received a message from Robins saying that he wished me to play against the Indians. ‘Sorry,’ I replied ‘I’ll be climbing mountains with my chemistry master.’” 98 ‘Go Back to What You Love’