[1] He was a noted patron of the game who organised a number of matches in the 1790s[citation needed] and was a plantation owner in the British West Indies.
Morant was born in 1772,[1] the son of Edward Morant, a Member of Parliament, and his second wife Mary Whitehorne Goddard, daughter of James Goddard of Conduit Street, London.
His family had owned a number of slave plantations producing sugar in Jamaica for generations, and Morant inherited the estates belonging to his aunt Elizabeth Morant and her husband William Gale who died in 1784, as well as those of his father who died in 1791.
His son Edward John Morant Gale was also a cricketer, and married Maria Henrietta, second daughter of Sir Simeon Stuart in 1845.
[1] At his death most of his properties in Jamaica, where slavery had been abolished in 1838, were heavily mortgaged, with only one passing to his wife and son.