Lives in Cricket No 1 - Allan Watkins

had seen a succession of new players winning Test caps. Reg Simpson had come in for the third Test against New Zealand, when Brian Close played for the first time, and that summer had seen the emergence of Trevor Bailey, first chosen to spearhead the attack but also capable of making useful runs. Against West Indies in 1950, other new batsmen were tried, a disproportionate number – Doggart, Dewes, Insole and Sheppard – following in Bailey’s footsteps from Cambridge. That winter, another Light Blue, fast bowler John Warr, was chosen to tour Australia, in a party travelling under the captaincy of Freddie Brown, yet another Cambridge man, though of an earlier vintage. To those in the professional ranks, the whiff of nepotism hung around the corridors of Lord’s. For the likes of Allan it felt as though there was a conspiracy against them. Brown, it was said, insisted on taking the party of his choice to Australia, but critics felt that the team’s prospects had been reduced before they set sail by some of the selections. In the event, Warr, Hollies and Berry achieved little as bowlers, while the quartet of inexperienced batsmen – Dewes, Sheppard, Close and Allan’s Glamorgan team-mate Gilbert Parkhouse – were all found wanting. With professional football behind him, Allan decided to spend the winter in South Africa, where there was a long tradition of Glamorgan players taking up coaching positions. It was the veteran opening batsman Emrys Davies, the county’s senior professional, who first suggested that Allan might enjoy the experience. Emrys and the pre-war player Dai Davies, now a Test umpire, were planning to make their annual trip to South Africa. The quiet, deeply religious Emrys would be heading for Kimberley, while Dai was going to Johannesburg, where Allan would accompany him. In Johannesburg Allan and Dai divided their time between several secondary schools, and twice a week they had to cope with a hundred boys of differing ages and ability at Ellis Park. Among those chosen to attend was a lanky 14-year-old in whose future Allan would soon show a paternal interest. Peter Walker, destined to be on the Glamorgan staff for 18 years and to play three Tests for England, had first come across Allan when he had toured two years earlier. Now describing him as “my mentor”, the young Walker had been in Durban to see Allan catching Dudley Nourse. “It stuck in my memory,” he says years later, “as Nourse was the big hero of South African batting. I can’t remember the shot. I just Back on the County Circuit 57