Cricket writer and broadcaster
David Rayvern Allen |
|---|
| Born | (1938-02-05)5 February 1938 |
|---|
| Died | 9 October 2014(2014-10-09) (aged 76) |
|---|
| Nationality | British |
|---|
| Occupation(s) | Cricket writer and historian, radio producer, presenter and speaker |
|---|
David Leonard Rayvern Allen (5 February 1938 – 9 October 2014)[1] was a cricket writer and historian, as well as a radio producer and presenter, a speaker and a musician.[2][3][4] His radio productions won awards including the 1991 Prix Italia for Who Pays the Piper, a collaboration with Richard Stilgoe.[5] He died aged 76 in 2014.[6]
Life and career
Allen was born in Streatham, London, and went to school at Sir Walter St John's School, Battersea.[1] He gained external music diplomas from the Royal Academy of Music and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London.[1]
Allen spent his working life as a radio producer with the BBC, working on a wide range of programmes before retiring in 1993.[7] 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.[7]
He won several awards for his cricket biographies.[1] 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".[7]
He married Rosemary Clark in 1966. They had two daughters.[1]
