Nat Fiennes - Lord Saye and Sele - the oldest Eton Rambler.

Lord Saye and Sele, who has died aged 103, was an Eton Rambler and almost certainly the last man to have played at Lord’s before the Second World War. As Nat Fiennes before inheriting his title, he played for Eton against Harrow in 1939 and represented Lords Schools against The Rest in the customary schools’ representative game in the same year. His obituary in ‘The Times’ described him as ‘a deft wicket-keeper and a classically elegant batsman who considered it close to a moral failing to hit the ball in the air’. After a distinguished war record in the Rifle Brigade, ‘he appeared for Oxfordshire, and enjoyed club cricket well into his sixties for the Green Jackets and I Zingari. As the longest-serving member of Marylebone Cricket Club, even in the past decade he would take the train to London and sit contentedly with his sons in the pavilion at Lord’s, sometimes joining a friend in the so-called Death Row reserved for members of 50 years’ standing or more’.

Nat Fiennes did not play in the Cricketer Cup, possibly because he was already 47 when the first match was played in 1967, but this begs the question of who is the oldest surviving person to have played in the Cricketer Cup. Eton Ramblers can offer John Farmer who will be 90 in August and who played in 1968. Can any other clubs suggest other candidates for the honour?

Interestingly Old Tonbridgians did have two players in their 1967 team who had played first class cricket before the war in Jack Davies, who bowled Bradman for a duck at Fenner’s in 1934, and John Thompson. Both are now deceased but, as a secondary question, are there any others who played first class cricket before the war and later played in the Cricketer Cup?