Colin Ingleby-McKenzie – A Life Well Lived by Martin Chandler

Colin Ingleby-McKenzie was the last of his line, that of the roistering, carousing amateur who managed to play the game of cricket to a high standard and, whilst burning the candle at both ends as well as in the middle, earn almost universal respect and admiration as captain of a county side.

Ingleby-McKenzie came from a naval background, his father being a Surgeon Officer who eventually rose to the rank of Vice-Admiral. The inevitable consequence was that the young Ingleby-McKenzie led a peripatetic existence before attending Ludgrove Preparatory School in Berkshire from the age of eight. To illustrate the sort of people he was always at ease with the Duke of Kent was one of his contemporaries there.

The headmaster at Ludgrove was Alan Barber who before going into teaching had enjoyed two productive seasons as an amateur batsman for Yorkshire. Ingleby-McKenzie was already a fine cricketer even at that tender age and was marked down by Barber and Hampshire men Harry Altham and Desmond Eagar as one to watch.

At thirteen Ingleby-McKenzie moved on to Eton College, then as now one of the most prestigious, if not the most prestigious of the English Public Schools. It is clear from his 1961 autobiography that the occasional privations that pupils had to undergo held no terrors for Ingleby-McKenzie, who in time was elected President of the Eton Society, also known as Pop, a group of senior pupils who traditionally enjoy special privileges.
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