debt-ridden estate, Spencer Ponsonby picked the lower card and returned to claim his inheritance: he is said to have seen Brympton d'Evercy and vowed to retain it at all costs. Whatever the truth of the legend. Spencer Ponsonby, newly renamed Spencer Ponsonby-Fane (in accordance with Lady Georgiana Fane's last wishes), was a pillar of the British establishment, one-time private secretary to Lord Palmerston, and later comptroller of Buckingham Palace in the reign of King Edward VII. However it was cricket that was his first love, although he did father eleven children. Through Sir Spencer Ponsonby-Fane Brympton d'Evercy became a meeting place of cricket lovers. It had its own cricket pitch, where large house parties played against local and visiting teams. A house party devoted to cricket took place each year, a tradition which survived long after Sir Spencer's death and into the 1950s. As treasurer of the MCC, Sir Spencer laid the foundation stone for the pavilion at Lord's. He founded the Old Stagers club of Canterbury, and most eccentrically the team known as I Zingari, a wandering cricket club of assorted aristocrats and Victorian and Edwardian notables. Throughout Sir Spencer's ownership of Brympton the house and estate were maintained, but survived only through the good fortune of low taxation and agricultural rents. This branch of the Fane family had never been wealthy, and the First World War was to bring sweeping changes to not just Brympton d'Evercy but country houses all over Britain. Spencer Ponsonby-Fane died in 1915, leaving his estate to his eldest son John, who in turn died just a year after inheriting, leaving the estate to his son Richard. Richard Ponsonby-Fane was an aesthetic intellectual and also an invalid. Unmarried, he chose to spend most of the year in Japan, a subject on which he published several books and papers. Until his death in 1937, he returned to England and Brympton d'Evercy for just a few weeks of each summer in order to follow the cricket. In his prolonged absences, the house was occupied by his sister Violet and her husband Captain Edward Clive, a descendant of Clive of India. Violet Clive, the next owner of the property, has been described as "a grand eccentric and remarkable woman [who] played hockey for the west of England, rowed for the Leander Club, was a master carpenter and keen landscape gardener." She was a keen gardening ally of