Richard Penruddocke Long

Richard Penruddocke Long JP, DL (19 December 1825 – 16 February 1875) was an English landowner and Conservative Party politician. He was a founding member of the amateur cricket club I Zingari. Long was appointed High Sheriff of Montgomeryshire in 1858 and served as Justice of the Peace as well as Deputy Lieutenant for the county. Early life Born at Baynton House in East Coulston, Wiltshire, he was the second son of Walter Long and his first wife Mary Anne, daughter of Archibald Colquhoun. He was baptised in Rood Ashton on 4 July 1827. Long was educated at Harrow School and went then to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated as a Bachelor of Arts in 1848 and was promoted to Master of Arts four years later. Long joined the Royal Wiltshire Yeomanry, which his grandfather had helped to establish, and became a captain in 1848. He first appeared in first-class cricket at Cambridge and played 11 first-class matches in all over the next few years. In 1846 his elder brother Walter married 21-year-old Harriet Avarina Brunetta Herbert, only daughter and heiress of Captain Owen Herbert, of Dolforgan Hall, Montgomeryshire. Harriet died the following year as a result of complications during childbirth, and Walter died three months later, some say of a broken heart. These events eventually led to Long inheriting his father's estates in 1867, including South Wraxall Manor, Rood Ashton House and Southwick Court in Wiltshire, and the former Herbert estates of Dolforgan and Machynlleth in Montgomeryshire. Career Long's relationship with his father was at times strained, with disagreements over money and property, and what Long saw as his father's refusal to help him establish his political career, having contested South Wiltshire unsuccessfully in 1852. When he married in the following year, he and his wife Charlotte went to live at Dolforgan. He was worried about the increasing encumbrances placed on the estates by his father, who he believed was manipulating sales of portions of the settled estates to his future disadvantage. His mother died in 1856, and his father remarried a year later, which caused even more acrimony between the two.