Sir Horatio Mann, 2nd Baronet

Sir Horatio (Horace) Mann, 2nd Baronet (2 February 1744 – 2 April 1814) was an English MP. He is remembered as a member of the Hambledon Club in Hampshire and a patron of Kent cricket. He was an occasional player but rarely in first-class matches.

Life

Educated at Charterhouse School, he was MP for Maidstone from 1774 to 1784 and MP for Sandwich from 1790 to 1807. He had a number of influential friends including John Frederick Sackville, 3rd Duke of Dorset, with whom he shared a keen cricketing rivalry. He owned Boughton Place in Boughton Malherbe and Linton Park in Linton, both near Maidstone, and had his family seat at Bourne, near Canterbury. Within its grounds he had his own cricket ground Bishopsbourne Paddock which staged many first-class matches in the 1770s and 1780s. He later moved to Dandelion, near Margate, and established another ground there which was used for some first-class games towards the end of the 18th century.

Mann was a member of the Committee of Noblemen and Gentlemen of Kent, Hampshire, Surrey, Sussex, Middlesex and London at The Star and Garter in Pall Mall, which drew up a new revision of the Laws of Cricket on 25 February 1774.

He is variously called Sir Horatio and Sir Horace in the sources. Horace was used as a diminutive of Horatio so both names can be regarded as correct usage. He was always called Horace in Scores and Biographies, the main source for his cricketing activities.

His uncle

Sir Horace Mann, 1st Baronet, K.B., (c1701 – 1786), was the long-standing British Resident in Florence, and was accordingly created a baronet on 3 March 1755, having been made a Knight of the Bath in 1748 (when the above-mentioned Horace stood proxy). He died unmarried in Florence on 6 November 1786. His nephew, Horace, (see above) inherited his baronetcy. He had a now renowned correspondence with Horace Walpole.