Robert Porch

Robert Bagehot Porch (3 April 1875 – 29 October 1962) played first-class cricket for Somerset from 1895 to 1910. He was born at Weston-super-Mare, Somerset and died at Great Malvern, Worcestershire. Family and background Porch's family were prominent bankers in the company of Reeves and Porch in the Somerset town of Glastonbury and both his grandfather, Thomas Porch Porch (originally named Thomas Porch Reeves), and his father, John Albert Porch, were long-serving members of the town council and mayor of Glastonbury three times each. Porch's mother was Margaret Bagehot from Langport, a cousin of the economist and political writer Walter Bagehot; the Bagehots were also prominent Somerset bankers and the family firm was Stuckey's of Langport, which had taken over Reeves and Porch and which was in Victorian times the second largest producer of banknotes in England after the Bank of England. The colonial administrator Montague Phippen Porch (1877–1964), who became the third husband of Jennie Jerome and therefore the stepfather of Winston Churchill in 1918 (though three years younger than Churchill), was Robert Porch's first cousin. The Porch family's wealth was based on the bank, but a run on the bank in the early 20th century meant that the estate at Edgarley in Glastonbury was broken up on Robert Porch's father's death in 1914. Robert Porch was educated at Malvern College where he was a member of the first eleven at cricket and second eleven at football, and a school prefect. He then studied at Trinity College, Oxford, graduating in 1898. Cricket career Porch was a right-handed middle-order batsman. He did not appear in first-class cricket for Oxford University, but when Somerset played the university side in 1895, he played for the county team, scoring 11 and 42. At the end of the university term, he became a fairly regular player for Somerset in the second half of the 1895 season. In his third first-class match, against Essex at Taunton, he scored an unbeaten 85, and this was to be the highest score of his cricket career; he was upstaged in the match, however, by the Essex total of 692, which was the highest total for the county for 95 years until beaten in 1990. Even that Essex record was upstaged in Porch's next match for Somerset at Taunton, though, when Lancashire made 801, with Archie MacLaren setting a world record for the highest first-class score by making 424.