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.
[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.
[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".