Lives in Cricket No 23 - Brief Candles

26 Combe decided that the only way to cure him was to make him his gamekeeper. Thus Orchard Cottage became the gamekeeper’s. To walk past it on Mrs Hyland’s baking day was a mouth-watering experience, for she was famed in the village as a most perfect baker. Their sons were all expert at sports and one [Fred] played for his county. The only one to remain in Sedlescombe returned there badly gassed after the First World War, but he still managed to play cricket for many a year. 39 The village cricket pitch is now only about 200 yards from Orchard Cottage, but in the nineteenth century it was a little further away within the Oaklands Estate. I have been unable to find any definite evidence of any Hylands playing cricket for the village team in the days when Fred was a child, but this surely was where he and his brothers were first introduced to the game. On the move Despite the family’s firm Sedlescombe roots, Fred, like many an estate worker of the day, was regularly on the move throughout the first part of his life. In the 1911 census he turns up a long way from home, as an under- gardener at Sandon Hall near Stafford. By the outbreak of the First World War he had headed back south again. When he joined up in November 1915 his address was given as The Cedars Gardens in Harrow Weald, north-west of London; yet when, three months later, he was discharged from the Army ‘having been found physically unfit for further war service’ (the Northwich Guardian obituary says that he did not see active service because of a knee injury), his intended place of residence is stated to be at Leyswood Gardens, Groombridge, near Tunbridge Wells. Around 18 months later he was back in the London area. On 23 September 1917, at Holy Trinity Church, East Finchley, just across the road from the Summers Brown factory that supplied Jack Hobbs with his bats, Fred Hyland married local girl Ada Olive Gwendoline Flucke. 40 On the marriage certificate his address is now given as Addlestone (in Surrey), his occupation as gardener. Four years later, he was living in Ringwood in Hampshire: and this is where his cricketing story really starts. Cricket in Hampshire, and further afield The year 1921 saw the birth of Hyland’s daughter Beryl, and his first rise to some prominence in local cricket. From at least mid-June of that year he began appearing regularly in the Ringwood eleven, as a specialist bowler; 39 Beryl Lucey, Twenty Centuries in Sedlescombe , Regency Press, 1978. 40 The striking surname set me off trying to find a family link between Fred Hyland and Diana Dors, née Diana Fluck [sic], but without success. Ada’s family came originally from Herefordshire, though Ada herself was born in London, and Diana Dors in Swindon. Incidentally, Ada’s maternal grandmother bore the maiden surname of Trumper; but once again I can find no link to a certain more famous person of that name. Of the Late Frederick J.Hyland, again