More than a Wet Bob

Here are ten things I didn’t know about Lord Desborough.

1. He didn’t go to Eton.
2. He was in the Oxford boat in the 1877 Boat Race, the only dead heat.
3. He swam the Niagara rapids twice.
4. He climbed the Matterhorn three times.
5. He was elected as an MP, for Salisbury, in 1880.
6. He won a silver medal for fencing at the 1906 Intercalated Games.
7. He lived at Taplow Court where he built a stické tennis court.
8. He was a Knight of the Garter.
9. The Times published his obituary in 1920, twenty-five years prematurely.
10. He was a founder member of the Maidenhead Golf Club and the British Trust for Ornithology.

If you want to know more about this extraordinary man you will have to read the book when it is published. He was President of the MCC …

“Hang it all, Throckmorton, this is hardly cricket!” (Paddy Bellew, 1933)