David Rayvern Allen


David Leonard Rayvern Allen was a cricket writer and historian, as well as a radio producer and presenter, a speaker and a musician. His radio productions won awards including the 1991 Prix Italia for Who Pays the Piper, a collaboration with Richard Stilgoe. He died aged 76 in 2014.

Life and career

Allen was born in Streatham, London, and went to school at Sir Walter St John's School, Battersea. He gained external music diplomas from the Royal Academy of Music and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London.
Allen spent his working life as a radio producer with the BBC, working on a wide range of programmes before retiring in 1993. Later, as a member of the MCC's Arts and Library committee, he was largely responsible for the club's Audio Archive Project, a collection of several hundred interviews with cricket people; he conducted more than a hundred of the interviews himself.
He won several awards for his cricket biographies. His Wisden obituary said of them that he was "conscientious, readable, judicious" and that he "did not flinch from the less agreeable aspects of his subjects' characters".
He married Rosemary Clark in 1966. They had two daughters.

Works

Radio

With Richard Stilgoe

Cricket-related (partial list)

Other

  • Punches on the Page: A Boxing Anthology
  • Living with London Methuen