Lives in Cricket No 22 - Jack Mercer

134 A scorer’s lot For many years Jack had been lodging in a mews property off Upper Berkeley Street, in Marylebone just north of Oxford Street. The attractive daughter of his landlady was a fashion buyer for a leading department store in the West End, and Kay Kemish – she was registered at birth as Kathrine – duly became Jack’s partner before, in 1973, the pair got married, with Jack aged 80 and Kay aged 60. After the death of Kay’s mother the pair continued living in Upper Berkeley Street, in what was described as ‘genteel poverty’, with relatives joking that they ‘seemed to survive on a combination of alcohol, chocolate and cigarettes!’ Sadly, Jack’s health started to deteriorate in the mid-1980s, and on 31 August 1987 he died at home in Upper Berkeley Street from ischaemic heart disease and carcinoma of the skin. He was 94 years old, although in the words of Matthew Engel, ‘at least he was thought to be 94; it was one of Jack’s charming idiosyncracies that no-one was ever quite sure how old he really was.’ 118 His funeral on 8 September was a quiet, mostly family occasion at the St Marylebone cemetery at Finchley in North London. He had, of course, outlived many of his playing contemporaries and, living away from his Northamptonshire colleagues, he was not in regular touch with them. Kay died in July 1999 and was buried alongside Jack in their double plot. Other members of the Mercer family are buried nearby. Press obituaries made a point of referring to his geniality. As an epitaph, though, Jack would have probably settled for something that George Gunn Jack with an unknown Northamptonshire supporter at the Scarborough ground in 1981, at the end of his first-team scoring career. 118 Wisden Cricket Monthly , November 1987. The Wisden almanack reported his birthdate as 1895, rather than 1893, until its 2003 edition.