Antony William ALLEN 1912-2003

	Player number 163 (f-c debut for Northamptonshire – 29 June 1932)
Birthplace	Evenley, Northamptonshire
First-Class	8 matches, 384 runs @ 25.60; 3 catches

When long-serving Northamptonshire scorer Leo Bullimer was asked in 1937 to select his best-ever County team from the players he’d seen since taking up the pen back in 1900, he surprised the majority of supporters by selecting young batsman Tony Allen based on his handful of County appearances – as well as preferring ‘Bumper’ Wells to ‘Nobby’ Clark. The soon-to-be-married Allen was also approached about taking on the captaincy that year but business commitments (he had started work as an insurance broker in London straight from Cambridge University) forced him to decline, and he had by then played the last of his first-class cricket – apart from a few post-war outings for Free Foresters. An Eton contemporary of future Test Match Special commentator and all-round broadcasting great Brian Johnston, Allen hit 112 against Harrow at Lord’s in 1931, won two blues at Cambridge and was one of Northamptonshire’s five skippers during the grim 1936 season – leading the side against Lancashire and the touring Indians early on and scoring runs in both games. ‘Were he able to play regularly and open the innings with (Fred) Bakewell, Northamptonshire would have the most attractive pair of opening batsmen in England, bar none’ noted the club’s yearbook. But, interviewed many years later, Allen revealed that he viewed county cricket very differently: ‘I wasn’t about very often and tended to feel I was doing someone else out of a job.’