Robert Scott was the elder son of the stockbroker Thomas Gilbert Scott who set up a country house cricket ground at Pelsham, near Peasmarsh, East Sussex, that hosted an annual cricket festival which attracted some Test players and also staged warm-up matches for touring teams in the 1920s and early 1930s.
He then went to Magdalen College, Oxford, in autumn 1928, and the following April in the Easter vacation he went on an amateurs' cricket tour of Egypt organised by Hubert Martineau.
In an Oxford side with a strong batting line-up led by Melville and the Nawab of Pataudi, Scott made occasional useful scores, with a best of 61 against H. D. G. Leveson Gower's XI.
The match was dominated by two record-breaking batting performances as first Alan Ratcliffe, the Cambridge opening batsman, scored the first-ever double-century in the University Match with 201, and then the Nawab of Pataudi bettered that with 238 not out; Scott was the only Oxford bowler in Cambridge's first innings to restrain the batsmen and he recorded figures of six wickets for 64 runs from 33.2 overs, which remained the best of his first-class cricket career.
[8][9] In the match against Northamptonshire at Northampton, he made 116 out of 169 in exactly 100 minutes, hitting seven sixes, all of them off Vallance Jupp, and 11 fours; it was his first century and it remained his highest first-class score.
As the elder son and with a sister who had been incapacitated in a riding accident, Scott took over the running of the Pelsham estate and had little time for cricket.
[14] After the Second World War he revived the Pelsham cricket week at his house in East Sussex that had been run by his father 30 years earlier.