Lives in Cricket No 23 - Brief Candles

33 He also had a sideline as a repairer of cricket and hockey equipment. Mike Talbot-Butler recalls that he may also have been a cricket-bat maker; at any rate, he was certainly very wise about bats. This despite the fact that, on his own admission, he had a low (and apparently accurate) regard for his own batting. Away from the regular sporting field Hyland maintained other competitive interests, in horticulture and in cage birds. According to his Northwich Guardian obituary, ‘his sideboard became full of cups and trophies, won all over the country for showing chrysanthemums, and his prize-winning budgies and canaries also brought him fame.’ Indeed, it was the latter that earned him his only entries in the pages of The Times , other than his listing in Hampshire’s team-sheet in 1924: on 1 February 1934 he was named as a ‘leading winner’ in the Norfolk Canaries class at the National Show of Cage Birds at the Crystal Palace. At the Norfolk Bird Show in November 1935 his buff hen won the cup for the best amateur’s Norwich plainhead. There is no reason to doubt the reference in his Wisden obituary to him having a reputation as a nurseryman, even though its source is unknown; but whether this reputation derived solely from his success with his chrysanthemums is less certain. Neil Jenkinson’s piece on Hyland in the 2003 Hampshire Yearbook tells of him opening a market garden where he specialised in orchids, though I have been unable to trace where this was. And although in his will Hyland described himself as a ‘retired market gardener’, this was evidently not such a prominent element of his life as to justify a reference in the family-written obituary in the Northwich Guardian . For us to think of him now, on the strength of one line of Wisden , only as a successful nurseryman is, at best, telling only a small part of his story. For there was yet more. During the Second World War he served as an ARP warden, and also during the war, if not earlier, he gave his name to another venture with which his family was long associated in Northwich. The local telephone directory for 1945 has an entry for ‘F.J.Hyland, Pet Stores’ at 11 Crown Street, and that entry was retained until 1959, by which time Fred was 65. Whether Fred was active in running the shop alongside his full-time duties for ICI in the earlier part of this period is not certain; if he ran this shop for the best part of 15 years, it is surprising that it is not referred to in the Northwich Guardian obituary. We know that he resigned his post with ICI early in November 1951, for reasons given as ‘personal betterment’; 53 maybe he wanted to spend more time with his pets, or was this the start of his later-life career as a nurseryman? From 1960, the directory entry for the shop changes to ‘K.P.Hyland, Pet Stores’ – K.P. was his son Kenneth, known as Ken – and in 1966 the store moves from Crown Street to 9 Market Hall, as Hyland’s Pet Stores. By now, or soon after, both of Fred’s sons had become involved in the business, with Philip, a leading light of the local angling community, diversifying the business by adding the sale of fishing tackle to the core pet business. 53 Information from his personnel records at ICI, kindly supplied in a personal communication from Judith Wilde of Brunner Mond, predecessors of, and successors to, ICI at Winnington in June 2009. Of the Late Frederick J.Hyland, again