Island profile: All-American Brit David Shillingford

Who knew the game of cricket could find a home on Shelter Island?

Retired British Army officer David Shillingford, a dashing 45-year-old corporate executive these days, bet it could.

A member of the venerable Lords Cricket Ground in London, the mecca of the sport where his father-in-law, father and grandfather were members before him, he and his British wife Catriona (known to everyone since childhood as Pom) have owned their immaculately restored farmhouse on North Menantic Road for more than 10 years and are part of a small crowd of British and Australian ex-pats who rent or own homes here.

“Every summer I’d meet with Aussies and Brits and cricket would always come up over the barbecue,” Mr. Shillingford explained on a recent weekend as his three kids and Pom padded around the house and yard. “Every year we edged closer to saying let’s do it. Of course, what we didn’t have was a cricket pitch. Unlike your baseball, a cricket ball is supposed to bounce before it gets to the batsman so you need a flat pitch or wicket as we call it.”

So in 2011, Mr. Shillingford turned to his landscaper, former town supervisor Gerry Siller, for advice. He suggested a temporary modification to the Fiske Field diamond and agreed to make the pitch, so to speak, to the School Board for permission to use it.

When he suggested making the town’s ambulance squad the tournament’s beneficiary, Mr. Shillingford was delighted. “I think those of us who visit temporarily, anything we can do to support the day-to-day life of the Island should be top of our list. And that was the core mission of the cricket tournament, to have the people who visit the Island support the people who live on the Island.”

Next he asked his Brit friend Gareth Jones, another homeowner here, if his brother — a member of a cricket team in London — would bring his teammates over for the match. When Mr. Jones’s brother said sure, the tournament was on.

Held last August, the event drew about 200 people and raised $12,000 for the ambulance squad through corporate sponsorships, donations, merchandise sales “and what we refer to as an English country fair” with games for kids.

The British players “didn’t have full teams so we lent them locals,” including British-born local teacher Frank Emmett, Mr. Shillingford said.

“The game was adequate, putting it strongly, but we proved to people we were going to do it and that we were serious about it.”

This year’s second annual tournament will be on Saturday, July 27 at the Island Boatyard from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. James Brantuk of the Boatyard and Keith Bavaro of the restaurant SALT are helping out. Those London cricketers can’t make it this year because one of them is getting married so teams will be made up of homeowners, renters, guests and locals.

“We have discerned we’ll actually have the ability to play with U.S. versus U.K. teams,” Mr. Shillingford explained, with the split among the ex-pat crowd depending “on who is more American … what it says on your passport, what it says on your kids’ passports, how long you’ve been here, where the company you work for is domiciled. We’ll add all that up and decide who is British and who is no longer British,” he added with a laugh.

Mr. Shillingford seems about as British as they come. He’s the son of a British naval officer who met David’s mother in Singapore, where she worked as an administrative assistant for an admiral. Like his elder sister, David was born on the island of Malta and grew up in posts all over England, Scotland and around the world, with a three-year stint in Australia making a particularly strong impression on him.

“If I was not already pre-disposed to being outside and playing sports, Australia certainly strengthened that,” Mr. Shillingford said. Anything outdoors, especially competitive sports — or just throwing the ball around for an hour with his three kids — continues to delight him. “You’d be hard pressed to find a sport I wouldn’t enjoy playing,” he said.

“And that he’s not annoyingly good at, even the first time he plays,” added Pom passing by.

David went to boarding schools in England then traveled the world for a year, before going on to study chemistry at the University of Exeter.

Duty bound to go into military officer training because the army had sponsored his schooling, he entered Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and served in Germany the year the Berlin Wall came down and in Northern Island before peace ended the Troubles. “I joined because I was obliged to and ended up loving it and felt I would stay forever,” Mr. Shillingford said. “Nothing could get done without people working together” and “there was always a very clear mission and purpose, things I still find to be very important” — including at the company he heads now, Verisk Crime Analytics in New York.

He decided to make a change when he was offered a promotion to major, which meant his future in the Army would be behind a desk. He was 30, single, and before long he was introduced to a man who ran a small London company, Art Loss Register, that was building an international database of stolen art for clients in the insurance industry. He sent Mr. Shillingford to the New York office to expand the American side of the business.

“It was wonderful to be in a small company that had such a clear purpose with such a tangible and dramatic outcome,” Mr. Shillingford said, “when we would recover stolen works for people who thought they never would see something they loved again.”

Working with the company’s chairman, Robert Talbot, he founded a similar company that developed a database of stolen construction equipment — something he’d learned from his contacts in the insurance industry was of prime concern. That company, National Equipment Register, was acquired by Verisk Analytics, for which Mr. Shillingford now works.

Pom was a magazine editor in New York whom David met at her “leaving party.” She was headed back to London to start her own editing business “so there were a couple of years of trans-Atlantic dating. When we got engaged, we had to have a discussion whether I’d go to London or she’d come to New York.”

Mr. Shillingford said he was not sure how he’d won that arm-wrestling match. “I think it was the last one I ever won,” he joked.

They fell in love with Shelter Island thanks to people Pom met serving as a family surrogate in the U.S. for a close British friend who died at the World Trade Center on 9/11. A group was renting a house on North Menantic Road, four doors up from the farmhouse they would soon buy.

“We looked at the house just to be nosy. We walked out and looked at each other thinking the same thing, that it would help us handle the insanity of renting in the city. So we did it and it seemed like an absurd decision at the time and it’s one of the best we ever made.”

For all his Britishness, Mr. Shillingford and his family are all officially American so there’s not a lot of irony in featuring this former Queen’s soldier close to Independence Day on the Reporter’s website.

“I’ve always enjoyed July 4th,” he said. “And the jokes have declined somewhat since Pom and I became U.S. citizens and the kids’ American accents have taken hold. Joking aside, the opportunities and friendships that this country have offered us make the holiday a genuine celebration of the country that America has become.”