Robert Scott

Robert Strickland Gilbert Scott (26 April 1909 – 26 August 1957) played first-class cricket for Oxford University and Sussex between 1930 and 1934. A right-handed middle-order batsman and a right-arm fast-medium bowler, he was Sussex captain in a few matches in 1932 and regularly in 1933, at first unofficially because of the ill-health of K. S. Duleepsinhji, and then as the official captain later in the 1933 season. Family and education Robert Scott was the elder son of the stockbroker Thomas Gilbert Scott who set up a country house cricket ground at Pelsham, near Peasmarsh, East Sussex, that hosted an annual cricket festival which attracted some Test players and also staged warm-up matches for touring teams in the 1920s and early 1930s. Robert Scott was educated at Winchester College where he was captain of the cricket eleven. He then went to Magdalen College, Oxford, in autumn 1928, and the following April in the Easter vacation he went on an amateurs' cricket tour of Egypt organised by Hubert Martineau. On his return, he played in the freshmen's trial match for the Oxford University side, but was not then picked for any of the first-class matches in the 1929 season. First-class cricket Scott's experience in 1930 was, up to a point, similar to that of 1929. He went on a second Martineau tour of Egypt at Easter, and returned to an Oxford trial match where he again did not distinguish himself. But this time at the end of May 1930 he was handed his first-class debut for Oxford University in a match against Glamorgan; however, he scored only 4 and 6 and he failed to take a wicket. He was dropped from the team after this, but returned to first-class cricket a week later when he played for the Free Foresters amateur team against the University: used as an opening batsman, he scored 26 and 15 and took his first wicket, that of Alan Melville. It was not enough to earn a recall to the Oxford side, however.