Lives in Cricket No 1 - Allan Watkins

Chapter Seven Senior Professional in India Allan had enjoyed a good all-round season in 1951 with 1,620 runs, 64 wickets and 40 catches. It was enough to win him a place in the MCC team for the tour of India, Pakistan and Ceylon. All the leading players preferred to take a winter’s rest and only two of the party, Roy Tattersall and Brian Statham, had been on the tour of Australia, the Lancashire pair having flown out as reinforcements. When Jack Ikin withdrew in favour of Cyril Poole, only nine of the 16 setting off for India had played Test cricket and only Tattersall, with nine, had more than Allan’s seven caps. Nigel Howard, Lancashire’s 26-year-old captain, was chosen to lead the team. The last of the mandatory amateurs plucked optimistically from county cricket, Howard had as his vice-captain Donald Carr, a former captain of Oxford University, soon to take over at Derbyshire. A third amateur was wicket-keeper Don Brennan of Yorkshire. Lancashire also provided the manager, their secretary Geoffrey Howard, unrelated to the captain, taking on single-handed a range of jobs that would now be shared by an army of assistants. Allan travelled as senior professional and, with a young captain who was hardly up to the job, it taxed him to the full. “I had to do a lot of thinking and talking,” he admits. An arduous trip lay ahead, a letter from MCC to the Indian Board showing some awareness of what might be in store in a country still finding its feet after Partition: ‘We have heard most alarming rumours of the present problems facing Europeans travelling by rail in India and feel that all journeys should be by air (or possibly road) except for a night journey leaving after dinner and arriving at its destination before breakfast. In particular, we regard the rail journey from Calcutta to Kanpur and thence to Nagpur as being objectionable.’ Anticipating a quite different set of problems, another pre-tour missive was sent to the Board: 60