David Mordaunt: 1937-2020

Sussex Cricket is sad to learn of the death of David Mordaunt at the age of 83.

David Mordaunt, at the time an Oxford prep-school teacher, scored a ‘dashing’ 96 in the second innings of his first-ever first-class match for Sussex in The Parks in June 1958: he holed out attempting the fourth six-hit of his innings. He never quite reproduced that same form when he played sixteen successive matches for the county in the first half of the 1960 season, while on special leave from teaching. Usually at around seven in the order, he made three fifties but was replaced by ‘Tiger’ Pataudi for the second half of the season, having played the last of his 19 first-class matches.

He had played for the Wellington College elevens of 1954 and 1955, and for the public-school representative side at Lord’s in the latter year, top-scoring in both innings with ‘stylish driving’. Down in Sussex in 1955 he played regularly for the Young Amateurs, for the Horsham and Sussex Martlets clubs, and in a single match for the county Second Eleven, when his 63 off Essex II was said to ‘augur well’. National Service took him into the infantry and away from county cricket, though he figured in Army representative elevens in 1956 and 1957. He was the Martlets’ leading batsman in 1958.

He returned to Wellington College in 1963 to teach mathematics and thereafter played county cricket for Berkshire in the Minor Counties Championship. He was capped in 1964 and made forty appearances over seven seasons, scoring 2,155 runs at 33.67 and taking 63 wickets at 20.00. He became a noted ‘expeditioner’, organising school expeditions to the Himalayas. At one time he had a croft on Skye, and more recently has lived on Speyside.

Obituary by David Jeater.