Donald Carr

Donald Bryce Carr OBE (28 December 1926 – 12 June 2016) was an English cricketer who played for Derbyshire from 1946 to 1967, for Oxford University from 1948 to 1951, and twice for England in 1951/52. He captained Derbyshire between 1955 and 1962, and scored over 10,000 runs for the county.

His cricket administration roles included twelve years as assistant secretary to the MCC, taking over as secretary of the fledgling Test and County Cricket Board in 1976. In his ten years in that role, cricket writer, Colin Bateman noted that Carr "mixed diplomacy with a sense of justice as first the Packer Affair, and then the first rebel tour to South Africa, threatened to split the world game".

Carr was the son of J. L. Carr, an officer of the Royal Berkshire Regiment, who was serving with the British Army of the Rhine in Germany. He went to Forres Boarding School in Swanage (the headmaster, R. M. Chadwick, a former opening bat for Dorset Minor Counties 1st XI, coached him) and then to Repton School, where his father had taken the post of bursar. Already an above average boy cricketer, he developed into one of the best young all-rounders under the coaching of Lionel Blaxland and Garnet Lee. In 1944 his last year at Repton, he captained The Rest against the Lord's Schools and the Public Schools' side against a Lord's XI.

Carr joined the Army on 1 January 1945, and was sent to Northern Ireland, where he had little scope to play serious cricket. In the summer he went to Wrotham for a training course and was chosen, on the withdrawal of George Pope, for England in the third Victory Test match against Australia at Lord's. He went to the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, and gained a Commission in the Royal Berkshire Regiment in February 1946. In the 1946 season he first played for Derbyshire in the County Championship. He made his debut against Kent, when he scored a duck in his only innings in a drawn match, but took two wickets. He also played for Combined Services.