hard to eliminate illegal bowling actions. As chairman of selectors from 1955 to 1961, he presided over a period of great success for English cricket, during which he worked closely with the Test captain Peter May. In 1963, he became MCC president, and was made the club's treasurer the following year. In this role, he was deeply involved in the D'Oliveira affair, a controversy over the potential selection of Basil D'Oliveira to tour South Africa. After Allen's gradual retirement from his administrative roles, he was knighted in 1986 and spent his later years in a flat close to Lord's, where he died, aged 87, in 1989. Early life Allen was born on 31 July 1902 in Bellevue Hill, Sydney, Australia, the second of three children to Walter Allen, a lawyer, and his wife Marguerite (Pearl), née Lamb, the daughter of Edward Lamb, a Queensland government minister. Later rumours suggested that Allen's real father may have been the Middlesex cricketer Pelham Warner, who supported Allen in his cricket career. Both of Allen's parents had roots in England as well as Australia. In 1909, when Allen was six years old, his family moved to London—hoping that the children would benefit from an English education—where they initially lived in a flat before moving to various country villages. Finding that they enjoyed England, the family abandoned plans to return to Australia. After being educated by a governess, Allen joined Summer Fields School in Oxford in 1912. He began to play cricket seriously at school; by his second year, he reached the school second team, from where he progressed to the first team then the captaincy. His ability attracted the attention of Eton College, where a friend of Allen's father, C. M. Wells, was a housemaster. The family had planned to send Allen to Haileybury, but Wells persuaded Allen senior to send his son to Eton instead, although it was a considerable financial burden on the family. Allen, although not initially keen on the prospect, started there in the winter of 1915–16. At Eton, Allen played many sports, but his academic performance was no more than respectable, and he later admitted to laziness. In cricket, Allen played for his school house team and had reasonable success with bat and ball; by 1918 he was house cricket captain. After a trial match, and a spell in the school second team, he progressed to the Eton first