PERCY PERRIN - ETHEL MARY WEBB |
Ethel Mary Webb
Ethel Mary Webb was born at 11 Summerhill Road, then
called 1 Shakespeare Villas, on 18 June 1878, the oldest of a family with five children,
who later moved to 143 West Green Road. Their father was a wine merchant. Ethel married
Percival Albert Perrin at St James Church, Muswell Hill on 3 April 1901, and the
couple went to live at 194 Muswell Hill Road.
Ethel Perrins husband Percy Perrin, often known as Peter, was one of the leading cricketers in England in the Edwardian Golden Age of amateur cricket. Many of the leading practitioners were from public school and university backgrounds, but Percy came from an entirely different sphere. Born in a small terraced house in Lancell Street, Stoke Newington in 1876, his parents were publicans who had moved there from Shadwell and who had taken a pub nearby.
They moved to Tottenham Hale in 1878 where they ran the White Hart, and later took on The Bull, a fifteenth century timber-framed building where the Connaught is now located in Tottenham High Road.The Perrins were evidently very successful in the pub business and later in property because they were able to pay for the education of their two sons at a time when state secondary schools were few and far between. |
Percy was sent to Margate College, a small, private school
for boys in Kent, whose aim was to provide a sound commercial education. As a
cricketer he was coached there by John OConnor who later played for Derbyshire. In
1892 during the school holidays he started to play cricket for Tottenham Cricket Club,
then an important local club whose ground was located where Keston Road now stands. His
father died in that year and his mother took over the pub licence, presumably with Percy
later learning the ropes after he left school in 1893.
In his career
as a county cricketer Percy played more matches, 496, in the County Championship than any
other amateur. A big, heavy man, he was a hard hitting right hander he scored more
Championship runs, 27,703, than any other Essex player, including Graham Gooch. At
Chesterfield in 1904, he scored the first first-class triple century in the twentieth
century, 343 not out, setting an Essex record which has lasted a hundred years. In that
innings he hit 68 fours, setting a world record total which has remained unbeaten over the
same period. |
Off the field the Perrins enterprises were equally successful. With John Robson, a local builder, in 1910 they bought some 300 tenanted houses around Glendish Road at Tottenham Hale, and later had an estate agency with several branch offices.
These businesses were so successful
that they bought one of the first Rolls-Royce Silver Ghosts in 1913, coachbuilt by Angus,
Sanderson. Its detailing, which included inlaid mother of pearl and special upholstery, suggest that Ethel had an
important hand in its design as Percy was a man of plain tastes. (The illustration is an example of a Rolls Royce Silver Ghost 1913) |
The car was requisitioned by the Government during the
First World War and used in France by the Armys Director of Transport. They bought
other Rollers in 1931 and 1936.
The Perrins had one son, Meredith, who was born in 1901:
he married an American-born woman, Yvonne Earle, who after the Second World War went to
live in Australia: Yvonne became a well-known childrens book illustrator. Between
the wars, the Perrins bought further land in Norfolk and a second home in the Broads
village of Hickling, where they became friends of Lord Desborough, a former MP, a punting
and fencing expert, who had chaired the organisation which ran the Olympic Games in London
in 1908. Perrin and Desborough entertained members of the Royal family at their shooting
estate and in return were invited to Sandringham. The family had come a long way from
Tottenham.
(This article has been reproduced for the website from the original
written by David Jeator March 2005)