Sir Pelham ‘Plum’ Warner – Cricket’s Machiavellian Panjandrum

At Lord’s cricket ground, there is a stand named after Sir Pelham Warner, who dominated cricket in the first half of the twentieth century. He captained Middlesex and England before the Great War, and after the war combined extensive writing about cricket with serving on MCC Committees and for several years acting as Chair of the Test Selectors. He was a key influence on world cricket’s direction and moral tone, especially in supporting the traditions of cricket and the distinction between amateurs and professionals in the English game. He became a legend at Lords; affectionately known as ‘Plum’ or, later, ‘the Grand Old Man of English cricket’.

A few years ago, however, the suggestion was raised that Warner’s name should be removed from the Lords stand, on the grounds that his grandfather, Colonel Edward Warner, owned plantations in the Caribbean that had been worked by slaves. At once, the Dailies Mail and Telegraph rose up in spluttering dudgeon. How dare the good name of one of cricket’s greats be besmirched in the cause of wokery? Slavery had been abolished long before Warner was born, and he had never benefited financially from his grandfather’s ill-gotten gains. The storm in the teacup subsided, and the Warner stand remains.

But if Warner can’t be cancelled on grounds of his connection to slavery, are there any other reasons to cancel him? What about excessive self-regard, Machiavellianism, duplicity, favouritism, blame avoidance and being an implacable reactionary? Presumably these are not capital sins in the worlds of the Mail and Telegraph, but in this article we will examine the life and career of ‘dear old Plum’, and his influence, for good or ill, on English and world cricket.

Early Life and Playing Career

Pelham Francis Warner was born on 2 October 1873 in Trinidad, in the Caribbean, where his father, Charles Warner was Attorney General. Pelham was the youngest of 21 children, thus making any financial legacy from his slave-owning grandfather extremely dilute. At the age of 13 he was sent to Rugby school in England, where he captained the first XI. He also became a member of the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC), the private members’ club that effectively ran world cricket, and was dominated by men from the public schools and Oxbridge. Members had to be nominated and elected, and it was highly unusual for a schoolboy to become a member, a sign that Warner was beginning his ascent early. After Rugby, Warner went to Oriel College, Oxford, where he gained blues in 1895 and 1896. He studied law and was called to the bar, but never practised. After Oxford he dabbled in stockbroking and for a while was a part-time officer in the fashionable Inns of Court regiment, but for the rest of his life he made his living from cricket.

Photo taken from 'Plum Warner' (Mynell, 1951)

Warner made his debut for Middlesex in 1894, and for most of his career was an opening batsman. He became captain of Middlesex in 1908, and retained the job until his retirement at the age of 47, in 1920. During his playing career, he was a ‘shamateur’, with the status and privileges of an amateur, but living off expenses earned for playing in matches, which often exceeded the fees paid to professionals. In the years before the Great War, English cricket was dominated by two peers of the realm, Lord Harris, captain of Kent and influential MCC administrator, and Lord Hawke, captain and later President of Yorkshire. Warner ingratiated himself with both from the outset. He boosted his income by spending off-seasons playing in and often captaining touring sides, some put together by Lord Hawke, with accompanying expenses. Between 1897 and 1899 he toured the West Indies, USA (twice), Portugal and South Africa. During the latter tour, two matches were played between the touring side, captained by Lord Hawke, and a South Africa XI, that were subsequently awarded Test status. In the first match, Warner made 132, thereby retrospectively scoring a century in his first test match (it proved to be his only test century). Then in the winter of 1902-3 he captained a tour on behalf of Lord Hawke to New Zealand.

In 1903, the MCC took charge of international tours, and Warner was appointed captain of that winter’s test-playing tour to Australia. His was a controversial appointment. MCC’s first choice was Yorkshire’s F.S. Jackson, but he was not available. Popular opinion then switched to Lancashire’s Archie McLaren, but he was a prickly character who had rubbed some in the corridors of power up the wrong way. Warner, aged 30, was well on his way up the establishment ladder and was Lord Hawke’s choice. Despite being labelled “an inadequate nonentity”, and making little contribution to the Test matches as a batsman, Warner led England to victory in the Ashes series, assisted by the newly-developed googly bowling of B.J.T. Bosanquet.

Photo taken from 'Plum Warner' (Mynell, 1951)

By now, Warner had embarked on a parallel career as a journalist and writer of books on cricket. He began by writing reports of the tours he had been on, and match reports for newspapers during the English seasons. A theme of his writings was his self-promotion and dodging of responsibility for mistakes and failures. He wrote a book on the 1903-4 tour in which he declared himself innocent of any involvement in the captaincy controversy regarding McLaren (and also became the first to use the term ‘The Ashes’ for a test series between England and Australia), and once penned an anonymous match report in which he wrote, “Mr Warner played a faultless innings of 159”.

Warner captained the MCC in South Africa in 1905-6, suffering a rare setback by losing the series 4-1. His final MCC tour was to Australia in 1911-12. He was taken ill after the first match of the tour and did not play again, the captaincy passing to J.W.H.T. Douglas. Ill-health, probably of a digestive nature, was a recurring theme of his life, and caused him to have a thin and gaunt appearance (and to lose his hair early), but did not prevent him from living to a ripe old age.

Following the Great War, during which he interviewed candidates for officer training and helped organise morale-boosting cricket matches at Lords, Warner returned to Middlesex for two final seasons. He captained them to the county championship in his last year, 1920, retiring a hero of Lords. During his first class career he made 29,028 runs at an average of 36.28, with 60 centuries, a record that many county players would be satisfied with (and far better than Lord Hawke or Lord Harris). In test matches he was less successful, ending up with a record of 622 runs in 15 matches, average 23.92, owing most of his England caps to his habitual touring.

Between the Wars: Plum the Panjandrum

The epithet ‘panjandrum’ was given to Warner in a recent book by David Kynaston and Harry Ricketts. ‘Panjandrum’ is defined by Collins dictionary as ‘a pompous, self-important official or person of rank’, and fits Warner like a glove. After his retirement as a player, he spent much time at Lords, serving on MCC committees and for several years chairing the test selectors. Sir Derek Birley noted that “Warner was rapidly becoming the central figure in cricket, doubly influential because of his extensive writing about the game”. Once his playing career was over, Warner’s income came from journalism. He was founder-editor of The Cricketer magazine, cricket correspondent of the Morning Post and other newspapers, and wrote many books, completely unconcerned about any conflict of interest between his writing career and his work for the MCC. Indeed, when it was, as he put it, “urged in certain quarters that a member of the committee should not be allowed to write”, he defended himself by airily asserting, “you must get the right men to do the chronicling, men who are imbued with a genuine love of the game and a respect for its traditions” (i.e. himself). The Cricketer’s website today comments that Warner held “a portfolio of roles that seems incomprehensible now”.

Under Warner’s editorship, which he held for forty years, The Cricketer became the mouthpiece of the Establishment. In the first edition, he wrote, grandly, “Cricket, as Tom Brown has told us in the best of all school stories, is an institution and the habeas corpus of every boy of British birth”. As Derek Birley remarked, “The Cricketer had no more desire to move with the times than MCC, unless they could somehow have been put into reverse”.

The cricketer and writer R.C. Robertson-Glasgow gave a striking account of his first meeting with Warner, in 1920:

“Here he was in the flesh, bald as an ostrich-egg under his Harlequins cap, slight, small-boned, pale of face, and with nothing but cricket in his conversation”.

The Harlequins cap, which Warner habitually wore, was reserved for those who had played for Oxford University, that bastion of the Establishment, and signalled Warner’s tribal affiliation. Warner, along with his mentors Lord Harris and Lord Hawke, put his energies into upholding the traditions of cricket, encapsulated by the public school and Oxbridge slogan, “Play up, Play up and Play the Game”. To this end, he was a lifelong advocate of the distinction between amateurs and professionals, and of ‘the amateur spirit’ as being the lifeblood of first-class cricket. It was believed that only amateurs, who did not rely on the game for their livelihood, could truly play the game with the correct spirit – playing to win but playing fair. It was particularly important that a team’s captain should be an amateur, as the captain set the moral tone for the rest of the side. Lord Hawke once (drunkenly) roared at a Yorkshire end-of-season dinner, “Pray Heaven no professional may ever captain England!” Warner subsequently wrote, Sir Humphrey-like, “What no doubt Lord Hawke meant was that it will be a bad day for England when no amateur is fit to play for England”, saying exactly the same thing in more oleaginous language.

Photo taken from 'Plum Warner' (Mynell, 1951)

Warner’s adherence to the ‘spirit of cricket’ was at odds with the reality of the first class game. Firstly, many leading amateurs, including Warner himself, were ‘shamateurs’, making their living directly or indirectly from cricket. Secondly, as we will see, not all amateurs took the ‘play up, play up and play the game’ principle as seriously as Warner purported to. Thirdly, it belittled the role and contributions of professionals, many of whom knew far more about cricket than the amateurs employing them. But the ‘spirit of cricket’ was really about class, and the distinction between amateurs and professionals was no more or less than the British class system applied to the game. Amateurs came from the public schools and were members of the ruling classes, and the relationship between amateurs and professionals was essentially that between the gentry and their servants, officers and enlisted men or factory owners and workers. Those with privilege did what they liked and those without did what they were told.

In the 1920s, the fear among the ruling class was of Bolshevism, with the masses forgetting their allotted place and rising up against their betters. Warner despised such notions and sought to crush any uppityness among professional cricketers. In 1924, Cecil Parkin, a professional spin bowler for Lancashire and England, wrote an article daring to criticise the then England captain, A.E.R. Gilligan, for not using him more in a test match against South Africa, which England lost. Warner, in The Cricketer, wrote an outraged editorial demanding that Parkin apologise for such insolence, and that Lancashire took action against him, prophesying that, “the cricket world [would] regard him as the first cricketing Bolshevik and would have none of him”. Sadly, he was proved right; Parkin did not apologise and after further outspoken articles, Lancashire sacked him.

Warner maintained his belief in the sanctity of the amateur/professional divide to the end of his life (though, as we will see, with an occasional undercurrent of pragmatism when it suited him). As late as 1955, when in his 80s, he wrote in Wisden,

“The game is enriched by the amateur and I know this view is shared by many famous professionals...the amateur brings much of value to the game but we must not forget the professional. Few...men owe more to the professional cricketer than I do...I have always found him loyal to a degree and a splendid, happy companion both on and off the field”.

Note that the qualities Warner values most in professionals are loyalty to their betters and happiness with their lot.

In passing, if we can’t cancel Warner on grounds of benefiting from slavery, can we accuse him of racism? In truth, Warner was probably no more racist than most of his generation and class, and less so than the likes of Lord Harris, who actively sought to exclude the Indian K.S. Ranjitsinji from playing for England because of the colour of his skin (Warner, as Chair of Selectors, picked both Ranji’s nephew Duleepsinhji and the Nawab of Pataudi for England; aristocrats both, but brown-skinned). Warner made much of his upbringing in Trinidad and liked to relate how he learnt to bat from the bowling of a black boy named Killebree (Hummingbird). Warner was an imperialist who regarded cricket as a way of bringing (British, upper-class) civilisation to the less developed parts of the Empire. His granddaughter, the historian and writer Marina Warner, believes that Warner helped establish multi-racial cricket in the West Indies. At the same time, neither he nor anyone else had a problem with playing against all-white teams in South Africa. In short, his view of people of colour was probably similar to his view of professional cricketers – they were jolly good chaps so long as they knew their place.

Plum’s Modus Operandi

Duncan Hamilton writes,

“A Machiavellian streak ran through Warner like fat in streaky bacon. He was also Macavity-like – always scheming for or against something or someone, working paths that were afterwards difficult to trace back to him...Social status was blood and breath to Warner. He was oleaginous towards those he believed could advance his career. He was condescending to those he considered beneath him”.

Derek Birley adds that Warner,

“was dedicated to the principles of sportsmanship and the unwritten code, and he was prepared in their defence to bury his head deep in the sand (though...he was quite good at protecting his rear)”.

Warner’s machinations were all in the cause of furthering the success of the England team, along with his belief in the ‘spirit of cricket’, and himself as its guardian (and doubtless with at least half an eye on the knighthood that he would eventually be awarded). We will examine some examples of Warner in action, and his involvement in the controversies of cricket in the inter-war years.

Arthur Carr and the 1926 Ashes Captaincy: Warner was first appointed Chair of the England Test Selectors in 1926, when Australia were the opponents. England had lost the three Ashes series played since the Great War and naturally the pressure was on to turn the tide. The choice of captain was Nottinghamshire's A.W. Carr, a stockbroker’s son who had been educated at Sherborne school, and was therefore deemed to have the ‘right stuff’. But unusually for an amateur in those days, he subsequently wrote an acerbic autobiography, Cricket with the Lid Off’, in which he claimed that Warner never gave him a free hand as captain. The first test was virtually washed out, but in the second test, Carr controversially declared England's first innings closed on the last morning, giving Australia a chance to win the game, though in the end the match was drawn. Carr bluntly wrote, “P.F. Warner told me to declare the innings closed”. Then in the third test, Carr put Australia in to bat and was punished by the visitors scoring 494, insult being added to injury by Carr dropping Charlie McCartney early in his innings of 151. Again, Carr held that the decision to bowl first was urged on him by Warner. Plum, naturally enough, downplayed his involvement in his own subsequent account of the series.

Carr was struck down by tonsillitis early in the fourth test and was unable to continue. With the only other amateur in the team the young and inexperienced G.T.S. Stevens, the captaincy passed to the professional Jack Hobbs, who led England to another draw, but Carr was fit for the final, deciding test. However, despite turning up for the selection meeting, he was told he was not in the team, the captaincy passing to Kent’s Percy Chapman. Given the events of the previous matches it was not surprising that Carr was replaced, but the manner of his sacking by Warner had all the duplicity of a modern day football club chairman declaring full confidence in the team manager the day before dismissing him. Warner subsequently wrote a smoothly apologetic and cant-filled letter to Carr after stabbing him in the back, and making no mention of his (Warner’s) involvement in the bad decisions that led to Carr’s removal. England famously won the final test and the Ashes series 1-0, with the 48-year-old professional Wilfred Rhodes returning to the England side and taking four wickets in Australia’s second innings, while also, in a good example of Warner’s occasional pragmatic bending of his own principle of amateur captaincy, acting as the ‘power behind the throne’ for the uncerebral Chapman.

So Warner achieved a famous victory in his first series as Chair of Selectors, but the MCC dismissed him and his fellow selectors at the end of the year. While professing no hard feelings, Warner felt moved to note “the opinion of many” that he “had had something of a raw deal” (though perhaps not as raw a deal as Arthur Carr). Warner did not return to the test selectors’ chair for another five years.

Prejudices and Favourites: Through his journalism, back-stage influence and particularly as Chair of Selectors, Warner wielded considerable power over players’ careers. Some thrived under Warner’s patronage, while others found themselves frustrated. An example of the latter happened prior to the third test in 1926, when, despite the conditions favouring bowlers so much that Warner urged Carr to put Australia in to bat, the Gloucestershire off-spinner Charlie Parker, though in the squad, was controversially left out of the final eleven. Parker took 3,287 wickets in his career, third only to Wilfred Rhodes and Kent’s ‘Tich’ Freeman in the all-time list, but only ever played one test, in 1921. In 1929, Warner was a guest speaker at Gloucestershire's end-of-year dinner, and afterwards, when Parker and his teammate Reg Sinfield tried to get in a lift at the hotel, the lift-operator insisted that Mr. Warner be allowed in first. Parker’s patience finally snapped. Grabbing Warner by the lapels he responded: “I’ll never in my life make way for that bugger. He’s never had a good word to say for me. This so and so has blocked my Test match career… Make way for him? Mr Bloody Warner will go to bed when I’ve finished with him.” He was finally persuaded to let Warner go. No complaint was made and no disciplinary action was taken.

Charlie Parker was not the only professional bowler to be entitled to feel aggrieved by the way he was treated by Warner and the rest of the cricketing establishment. ‘Tich’ Freeman, a leg-spinner who took 3,776 wickets in his career, played 12 tests during the 1920s, and took 66 wickets, more than any other England bowler during the decade apart from Sussex’s Maurice Tate, but only played twice against Australia. Like Parker, Freeman was a victim of Warner’s prejudice against professional bowlers who were at their best in English conditions, though he lacked Parker’s fieriness and never complained about his lot.

Accusations of anti-professional bias were behind an unspoken feud between Warner and the leading cricket writer of the day, Neville Cardus. In the 1930s, Cardus wrote, regarding the work of the test selectors,

“Consciously or unconsciously, a ‘local’ prejudice is at work; more than ever the amateur player well known in London is given preference over a professional player of equal or superior skill who comes to London only once every summer”.

Without mentioning him by name, both Cardus and Warner knew that he (Cardus) was referring to G. O. B. (Gubby) Allen, a fast-medium paced bowler for Middlesex who had been educated at Eton and Cambridge and who was a particular favourite of Warner’s. Indeed, Warner treated Allen like a son and there was even a rumour that he was Warner’s son, stemming from (the married) Warner’s lifelong closeness to Allen’s mother. Warner, needless to say, quickly picked up his pen to repudiate Cardus’s criticisms, and served a dish of revenge, very cold, in 1949, when he was instrumental in blocking Cardus’s membership of the MCC, also objecting to Cardus’s low birth in a Manchester slum, where his mother supplemented the family income through sex work.

In 1936, Warner as Chair of Selectors appointed Allen captain of England. However, Allen was not the only England captain whose ascendancy was promoted by Warner, and in this case from a starting-point far removed from the cloisters of Eton and Cambridge. Wally Hammond of Gloucestershire was England’s best batsman of the late-1920s and 1930s and was a professional. Warner hugely admired Hammond, and in another display of pragmatism, wanted him, despite his background, to captain England. He therefore persuaded Hammond to become an amateur, dropping hints regarding the reward that would be forthcoming if he did so. Hammond duly found a sinecure job as a sales ambassador for a car dealer in Bristol and in 1938 he followed Gubby Allen as captain of England.

Warner and Bodyline: The biggest cricketing controversy of the inter-war years was the 1932-3 Ashes series between Australia and England, which became known as the Bodyline series. The events of that encounter came close to destroying the MCC’s reputation as the guardian of the Spirit of Cricket, and even threatened Anglo-Australian relations. And Warner was in the middle of the controversy, as the Chair of Selectors who picked the MCC team and captain, Douglas Jardine, and as Tour Manager of the MCC party.

‘Fast leg theory’, as Bodyline was officially known, was a style of bowling where a fast bowler deliberately bowled short-pitched balls at the batsman’s body, with a semi-circle of close catchers on the leg side. Although he did not invent it, Douglas Jardine, educated at Winchester and Oxford, saw it as a means of curbing the batting power of Australia’s Don Bradman, believing that Bradman had a weakness against that kind of delivery. Jardine ensured that a quartet of fast bowlers was selected for the 1932-3 tour: Harold Larwood and Bill Voce of Nottinghamshire, Bill Bowes of Yorkshire and Gubby Allen (yes, that one) of Middlesex. He developed his strategy in secret, at pre-tour meetings with Larwood and Voce brokered by their captain Arthur Carr (yes, that one), and at team meetings on the passage to Australia.

Bill Bowes had bowled ‘fast leg theory’ in a county match for Yorkshire during the 1932 season, and Warner wrote a condemnation of the tactic, asserting, “Now that is not bowling, indeed it is not cricket”, but as Chairman of Selectors he was instrumental in the choice of Jardine as captain, and the selection of Bowes, along with the other fast bowlers.

The MCC team used bodyline bowling in some of the early games on the tour, but it was kept in abeyance in the first test by Bradman’s absence through illness and stifled in the second by a docile pitch. Then in the third test, Jardine unleashed it with full force. In their first innings, Australia’s captain Bill Woodfull was struck over the heart by a ball from Larwood and later wicketkeeper Bill Oldfield was hit on the head and was unable to continue. Ironically, neither injury was due to bodyline bowling, but bodyline played a significant part in the game, and a general mood of aggression permeated the whole match, with Australia, lacking fast bowlers, unable to retaliate.

Outraged protests of ‘Not Cricket’ rose up from spectators and the Australian press, and a condemnatory cable was sent by the Australian cricket authority to the MCC. Lacking full information about what was happening in those pre-television and pre-internet days (even telephone communication was difficult), the MCC assumed that the Aussies were wingeing and cabled back in support of Jardine. The Australian government got involved and the atmosphere turned so bad that the tour came close to being cancelled. Even diplomatic relationships between Australia and Britain were threatened. The tour continued and England won the series 4-1, but as the cricketer and writer Rockley Wilson had predicted when Jardine was appointed as captain, they nearly “lost a dominion”, and the reputation of their amateur captains for ‘playing the game’ received a damaging blow.

So what was Warner’s involvement in the Bodyline controversy? Warner has two questions to answer. Firstly, was he aware when selecting Jardine and the quartet of fast bowlers of what Jardine was planning, and did he collude with Jardine in that plan? And secondly, once the series was underway and the controversy had broken, could he as manager have stopped the use of Bodyline?

For reasons we will mention below, we will never know the definitive answers to these questions. But for what it is worth, this is my guess. Warner selected Jardine as captain for his aggressive attitude and determination to defeat the Australians, and gave Jardine what he wanted by way of players to achieve that goal. But Warner did not anticipate Jardine using Bodyline as a tactic, assuming that an old Wykehamist would not do anything so clearly against the spirit of cricket. We do not know if Jardine and Warner discussed Bodyline before the tour or if Jardine gave Warner any assurance that it would not be used. Warner may even have felt that his condemnation of Bowes’s use of Bodyline in a county championship match may have been sufficient to warn Jardine off. But it is clear that Jardine had long intended to employ Bodyline against Bradman.

On the second point, it seems probable that Warner did not try to forbid Jardine from using Bodyline once the test matches were underway, and that if he had, Jardine would have ignored him. Following Woodfull’s injury in the third test, Warner visited the Australians’ dressing room to commiserate and apologise, but was met icily, Woodfull saying, “I don’t want to see you, Mr Warner. There are two teams out there. One is trying to play cricket, the other is not”. The comment was leaked to the Australian press (by Bradman), and when Jardine heard about it he was livid that Warner had undertaken the visit, and the England team issued a statement in support of their captain. Overall, the impression that emerges is that Warner was duped by Jardine regarding his plan to use Bodyline, and once Jardine had unleashed it, lacking support from the team or from the far-off MCC, Warner was powerless to stop him, despite the damage that Bodyline was doing to his vision of the spirit of the game, and to his own reputation.

Jardine and his team returned to England as heroes. Warner tried to claim as much credit as he could for their Ashes victory while distancing himself from Bodyline (to Jardine’s disgust). Jardine had done all that had been asked of him and was duly re-appointed captain for the 1933 test series against the West Indies. But during the 1933 season, the tide of opinion started to shift. More information became available as to the events of the Bodyline tour, including dramatic film clips of Woodfull and Oldfield’s injuries, and of Bodyline being bowled to a field of five or more leg-side close catchers. Then during the test series, England had Bodyline used against them, by the West Indies fast bowlers Learie Constantine and Manny Martindale, leading to some players, notably Wally Hammond changing their view of it (Bodyline was even used in that bastion of respectability, the Varsity match). Jardine did not help matters by writing a defiant book in which he refused to apologise for his use of bodyline.

 

Jardine was again made captain for the 1933-4 tour of India, but Australia was due to tour England in 1934 and Warner was advised by his political contacts in the Antipodes that Jardine would not be acceptable to them as England’s captain. Rather than make the decision, Warner resigned as Chair of Selectors – prematurely, as it turned out, as soon afterwards Jardine announced that he had no intention of playing against the tourists and was retiring from first-class cricket. He was replaced by his vice-captain on the Bodyline tour, the more emollient R.E.S. Wyatt of Warwickshire, and slowly the fuss died down. Warner duly restored himself to the Selectors’ chair in 1935, and in the same year the MCC finally passed legislation to outlaw Bodyline bowling. And in 1937, Warner received his knighthood.

But why can we not know for sure what Warner’s role was preceding and during the 1932-3 tour? Well, during WWII, Warner acted as deputy secretary of the MCC, keeping Lords open for cricket and, as in the Great War, organising morale-boosting exhibition matches. And sometime during Warner’s time in that role, key documents related to the Bodyline series mysteriously disappeared from the MCC’s files. Teflon Plum had covered his rear.

Plum in Later Life

By the time the war ended, Warner was 72, and while he would live for another 17 years, his influence began to wane. The MCC acquired another panjandrum, in the person of Warner’s former protege Gubby Allen, who served on many committees (sometimes voting against his one-time mentor) and in the 1950s took Warner’s old role as Chair of the Test Selectors. Warner was given the honour of the Presidency of MCC in 1950, but his power was diminishing. In 1955, Neville Cardus was finally admitted to Associate Membership of MCC, Warner now unable to stop him. Warner remained as editor of The Cricketer until 1962, but by then was a figurehead.

Photo from Hamilton (2019)

Allen was scarcely more progressive than Warner, but during the 1950s the MCC was being forced to consider change by the decrease in popularity of county cricket. One issue that needed to be addressed was that most sacred of Warner’s sacred cows, the amateur/professional distinction. In the late 1950s, an advisory committee was set up to consider whether it should be abolished.

Warner’s granddaughter Marina Warner recalls as a child visiting her grandfather in the flat he shared with his wife in South Kensington. Some years before, when Warner first met Marina’s Italian mother, he immediately set about teaching her the principles of cricket. Marina recalls the flat being filled with immodest memorabilia of Warner’s career. She also remembered Warner’s frugal appetite, a legacy of his years of ill health. Once, when asked at dinner if he wanted seconds, he replied, “Just one pea please”.

Pelham Francis Warner died on 30 January 1963. The next day, the MCC announced the abolition of the amateur/professional divide in English cricket.

Sources Used

 Birley D (1979) The Willow Wand: Some Cricketing Myths Explored. London: Queen Anne Press
Birley D (1999) A Social History of English Cricket. London: Aurum Press 

Foot D (1996) Wally Hammond: The Reasons Why. Robson Books

Hamilton D (2019) The Great Romantic: Cricket and the Golden Age of Neville Cardus. Hodder & Soughton

Kynaston D & Ricketts H (2024) Richie Benaud's Blue Suede Shoes. Bloomsbury Publishing

Meynell L (1951) 'Plum Warner'. Phoenix House

 

ESPN Cricinfo
...and various editions of Wisden Cricketer's Almanack