Reg Perks

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Reg Perks England (ENG)

Batting style	Left-hand bat
Bowling type	Right-arm fast-medium
	Tests	First-class
Matches	2	595
Runs scored	3	8956
Batting average	-	12.20
100s/50s	-/-	-/14
Top score	2*	75
Balls bowled	829	116074
Wickets	11	2233
Bowling average	32.27	24.07
5 wickets in innings	2	143
10 wickets in match	-	24
Best bowling	5/100	9/40
Catches/stumpings	1/-	238/-
Test debut: 3 March 1939 Last Test: 19 August 1939 Source: [1]

Reg Perks (in full Reginald Thomas David Perks; born October 4, 1911, Hereford, died November 22, 1977, Worcester) was an English cricketer who played in 2 Tests in 1939, and was the mainstay of Worcestershire's bowling for a long period from the middle 1930s until the middle 1950s. He was also an aggressive left-handed tail-end slogger, who frequently hit up thirty runs in twenty or so minutes, and on three occasions hit three sixes off consecutive balls. His highest first-class score of 75 against Nottinghamshire at Trent Bridge in 1938 took just thirty minutes.

Perks was first involved with Worcestershire as early as 1928, when he joined their ground staff. At the time, the team was in the middle of a streak of over fifty matches without a win, and apart from the amazing Fred Root, most of their bowlers and batsmen alike were second-rate - and the county had major financial problems all along. Perks, though, showed enough promise for the county to engage him for the 1930 season, and he showed considerable promise even in that first season, with 59 wickets for 23 each and 7 for 20 against Leicesterhire on a rain-affected wicket his outstanding performance. It was several years before he improved upon this, but by 1935 he was clearly one of the hardest-working of several emerging pace bowlers with 119 wickets for less than 22 each and an annual output of around a thousand overs per season. The following three years saw Perks maintain his form very well, with fifteen for 106 against Essex at Worcester in 1937 remaining the best figures of his career.

Though England had been so rich in pace bowling throughout the 1930s for Perks not to be a serious candidate for representative honours, with the fitness of Bowes and Copson questionable on rock-hard pitches, Perks was chosen for the tour of South Africa in 1938-1939. He played in only the last Test - famous as the eleven-day "Timeless Test" - doing very well in the first innings with 5 for 100 on the most docile of wickets but failing in the second innings. Inspired by this recognition, Perks went on to have his best season ever in 1939, with 159 wickets for less than 20 runs each, including thirteen hauls of five or more wickets in an innings in the County Championship. He again played in one Test against the West Indies and took five in an innings, but just when he seemed on the verge of being an England regular, World War II intervened.

When first-class cricket resumed in 1946, Perks was already 34 and, although England's extreme weakness in pace bowling made his omission from the representative teams of that season and the following winter's Ashes tour open to some question, it was already clear that Perks was unlikely to recover his form of the great 1939 season. He took fourteen for 96 against Gloucestershire at Cheltenham, but was generally expensive on pitches unaffected by rain. Though he never came back into representative calculations, he maintained a surprising consistency for the rest of his career: his first-class averages between 1946 and 1955 were all within the very narrow range from 23.28 in 1946 to 26.16 in 1951. Despite this relatively high average, Perks' tireless fast-medium bowling was considered an important part of Worcestershire's rise to third in the County Championship in 1949 and fourth in 1951.

In his last season, 1955, Perks became the first professional captain of Worcestershire, and he was applauded after taking five wickets for 79 runs against Hampshire in the last match, in so doing raising his aggregate to 100 wickets for the sixteenth consecutive season. This feat is bettered only by Derek Shackleton and Tich Freeman.

Perks played more than 500 matches for Worcestershire. He was the only man to take two thousand wickets for the county: his final total of 2,143 Worcestershire wickets (out of 2,233 in all) easily a county record, being more than 500 victims clear of second-placed Norman Gifford.