My father, Henry Pryor, who has died aged 92, devoted much of his life to grassroots cricket coaching and the invention of the bowling machine Merlyn. Merlyn proved revolutionary, both in how it made the ball torque and in playing a part in England winning the Ashes in 2005, for the first time in 18 years.
Always interested in cricket, my father had become a coach in his 50s, when I started playing as a child. He joined the Association of Cricket Coaches and began coaching primary schoolchildren in inner-city areas.
Dissatisfied with the bowling machines available, Henry began building Merlyn models. This continued after a move to Llowes, in the Welsh Borders, where he met a retired GPO electronics engineer, Gordon Rye, who put the first brain in Merlyn, so that sets of overs, for example “from Shane Warne”, could be programmed in. The next – transportable – prototype was built by Dave Cross. My mother, Anna, managed the project financially.
In 2003 John Abrahams, then the ECB National Academy assistant coach, viewed the Merlyn prototype, and asked for it to live at the academy in Loughborough. Two years later, Henry was manoeuvring Merlyn around the Ashes Test venues in a horse box. England used the machine on all practice days before the Tests as they worked out Warne’s angles. Players began asking for early starts and private sessions with Merlyn during the comeback second Test at Edgbaston, and England went on to a historic win over Australia.
As Andrew Strauss wrote in his 2007 autobiography, Coming Into Play: “We were fortunate to have a prototype bowling machine travelling with us around the country called Merlyn. It had taken its inventor a decade to get it fizzing out balls with a similar spin and trajectory to Warne, and it became increasingly invaluable to us as the series progressed.”
Born in Knockholt, Kent, Henry was one of four children of Olive (nee Woodall) and Charles Pryor, a tea merchant. The family moved to Framlingham in Suffolk after a bomb blew out their windows during the second world war. Henry was educated at Eton college, and did national service with the navy for two years before studying history at Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating in 1957.
He joined the family tea business, Pryor and Tindall, in 1960 for six years, after which he worked as an estate agent and went into property management. He then worked for a family laundry business, the Innisfail Laundry (1985-92), before moving to Wales in 1995, and working on Merlyn full-time as well as coaching in schools.
After the 2005 Ashes, Henry designed a lighter Merlyn to focus on spin bowling. He licensed the technology to Bola, a company in Bristol, and the first official machines were delivered in 2009.
Henry’s first marriage, to Deirdre, with whom he had three daughters, Georgina, Lucinda, Henrietta, ended in divorce. In 1979 he married Anna Harcourt-Cooze (nee Radburn), my mother. Anna, his children and five stepchildren, Arabella, Sein, Willie, Sophia and Jessie, survive him.
