Lives in Cricket No 26 - HV Hesketh-Prichard

10 India, Jersey and Edinburgh Dhyan Chand Stadium, named after the great Indian hockey player, and CricketArchive has a score there from 1902 – this was of course rather before the Indian princes started to take an interest in the game. On 14 January 1876 Kate O’Brien Ryall married Hesketh Broderick Prichard in Peshawar, now in Pakistan. Peshawar is nearly 700 miles from Gwalior, which suggests again that Kate was living in Gwalior with her grandparents and that her father was now based in Peshawar. Later that year came the tragedy. Broderick contracted typhoid, supposedly after drinking water from a stream when he was out shooting, and died on 5 October 1876 at Jhansi. Kate’s story gives a moving account which describes the poor quality of his treatment and his own refusal to recognise that he needed it. She was even prevented from attending the funeral, and says ‘I was taken away that night, entirely against my will, to another bungalow, from where at dawn next day I watched his funeral passing along the high ground, Big Ben [Broderick’s horse] was the charger, and I heard the muffled drums of the Dead March in Saul.’ Kate was left pregnant and widowed. The Army did not then pay pensions to dependants, though in some cases the Lord Clive Military Fund would pay a pension on a charitable basis, and so she was left dependent on the support of her father, now a brigadier, with a third wife and six children to support as well. Staying on as a young widow was not an option, with every chance of sinking into poverty or worse. Kipling’s Plain Tales from the Hills draws a picture of a life where just about anything was a fit subject for gossip that might ruin a reputation. Her husband’s family she had never yet met. She no longer had any reason to stay in India, and she and Hesketh sailed from Bombay on 14 February 1877. * * * * * * * Hesketh had been born in Jhansi on 17 November 1876, weighing nearly nine pounds. According to Kate, all the native officers and men came to salaam to Broderick’s son. She tells how the officers held out the handles of their swords for him to touch, and how when he touched one the subhardar-major said, ‘Look, look! The sahib’s little son accepts our homage, he will yet come back and be the captain sahib of our sons.’ Kate and the young Hesketh returned from India, arriving in Liverpool on 28 March 1877. Broderick Prichard’s will showed that he had left less than £600, which was simply the lowest figure that would have been recorded, so it was probably much less. If Kate and Hex were not living in poverty, it was certainly a state of dependence. On their return to India they lived again with the O’Briens, Kate’s grandparents on her mother’s side. Kate says that they were almost like parents to her, because they had taken charge of her when her mother died a few months after she was born – they were then in India. Strangely enough, Hex never seems to have had much contact with his own grandparents on either side: Kate’s father seems to have written her off with an annuity, and Broderick’s parents seem absent from the story. Some light is cast on their finances by some comments in a letter written