Gerald Mordaunt

Gerald John Mordaunt (20 January 1873 – 5 March 1959) was an English cricketer who played first-class cricket for Oxford University, Kent, the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC), the Gentlemen and other amateur sides between 1893 and 1904.^[1] He was born at Wellesbourne Hastings, Warwickshire and died at Hayling Island, Hampshire.

Educated at Wellington College and University College, Oxford, Mordaunt played cricket as a right-handed middle-order batsman and was noted also for his fielding: Pelham Warner in an obituary of him in The Times claimed that he never dropped a catch.^[2] He was in the Oxford team for the University Match against Cambridge for four seasons from 1893 to 1896 and was captain in 1895, when his team included three future captains of the England national cricket team, Warner, C. B. Fry and H. D. G. Leveson Gower.^[3] His own best innings, one of two centuries in his first-class career, came earlier in the same 1895 season, when he made an unbeaten 264 in a match against Sussex in which 1410 runs were scored, at the time a record for a three-day match.^[4] In 1895 also he started playing occasional matches for Kent, and continued for a few games in 1897 after he had left Oxford University. He did not play Test cricket but appeared in Gentlemen v Players matches in both 1894 and 1895.^[1] After 1897, his first-class cricket was restricted by business to a couple of MCC games in 1898 and a single match in 1904 for an amateur side.

Several members of Mordaunt's family also played first-class cricket: his brothers Sir Henry Mordaunt, 12th Baronet and Eustace Mordaunt played for Middlesex and for other teams; his father, John Murray Mordaunt, played for MCC and his grandson David Mordaunt was a Sussex and Minor Counties cricketer in the last days of amateurism in the 1950s.

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