Lives in Cricket No 26 - HV Hesketh-Prichard

21 Chapter Two Horsham to Haiti In the summer of 1894 Hex had left Fettes without going into the sixth form, having decided that he needed to earn a living. The first notion was that he should go into the Army, but ‘the doctors’ thought he would fail the physical exam as his heart was not very satisfactory because he was growing too much. It may well be – though she probably never actually said so – that Kate was reluctant to see him go into the Army: it would hardly have been surprising. Many young men with a level of education but small means set out for the Empire in those days, but that does not seem to have been an idea that appealed. Kate may have felt she had had enough of it, and though Hex was to wander various parts of the earth he never returned to India, nor did he go to Australia or South Africa. It was Hex’s own decision to leave school and work towards earning a living, but Kate says ‘our means were very limited and he would [need to] begin making something fairly soon’. As early as 1892 she had been, she says, sharing her financial difficulties with Hex. There was a suggestion that he should go to Edinburgh University for three years, but that seemed to be out of the question, largely for financial reasons. Kate’s father died in Australia in 1894, but whether that had an effect on their financial position is uncertain. As we have seen, Hex had been more or less offered a job and the eventual prospect of partnership by William Campbell Johnston, a lawyer in Edinburgh. That was a large part of the decision to leave school, and until the end of 1894 this was what he expected. However it turned out that Mr Johnston’s brother had a son who needed to be accommodated. Mr Johnston was willing to use his influence to get Hex in somewhere else, where he could learn the profession and eventually get a small salary, but said that it was difficult for an Englishman to get anything worthwhile in Scotland, and the prospect here appeared to be that he might be drawing a salary of £80 a year in, say, 15 years! The first man to see was his uncle, Charles Prichard, but according to Kate he for some reason refused to help. Charles may have felt that Hex should have gone to university or perhaps the Army, and those choices had been ruled out. However some friends of Kate’s came up with a possibility, which was to read for the law with a Mr Dewing at Horsham in West Sussex. They took a house there in Hurst Road and Hex began work in 1895 and soon passed the preliminary exam. Hurst Road was not only very handy for the cricket field and the station, but Maurice Dewing himself lived there – the 1901 census shows him at Poynters, Hurst Road.