Lives in Cricket No 26 - HV Hesketh-Prichard

66 Hex sailed from Southampton for Barbados on 17 January 1905 to join Lord Brackley’s team. Lord Brackley, born Hon John Francis Granville Scrope Egerton, was the eldest son of the third Earl of Ellesmere, and subsequently succeeded to that title and its landed and industrial estates. He was a soldier who had served in the Boer War, but now had decided to undertake a cricket tour in the West Indies. He had been educated at Eton but seems not have been in the eleven. His only first-class match before the tour was for MCC against Nottinghamshire at Lord’s in 1898, a rain- affected match in which only 21 overs were delivered, all on the first day, when he neither batted nor bowled. As far as first-class cricket was concerned, Brackley was thus something of an innocent. 34 He had no obvious connections with the West Indies, the family not being plantation owners. A number of other private teams had toured the West Indies, and there was some cricketing ‘infrastructure’: every two years there was an inter-colonial tournament involving Barbados, Trinidad and British Guiana. Jamaica was out of easy reach. One unusual feature for a private tour was the decision to engage two professionals, Ernie Hayes of Surrey and George Thompson of Northamptonshire. 35 Though normally you might have expected bowlers, Ernie Hayes was a batsman who in 1904 had scored just short of 2,000 runs and who the following winter would go to South Africa and play what were later judged to be Test matches. Hayes, cannily enough, also managed to arrange to report on the tour for The Sportsman . 36 Northamptonshire were still a minor county and would start their County Championship membership in 1905. Thompson’s first-class career had mainly consisted of playing for MCC (he had at some time been on the ground staff) and a number of representative and festival games, but he had been to New Zealand with Lord Hawke’s team in 1902/3. A fast-medium bowler, he too would later play a number of Test matches. Apart from Lord Brackley and the two professionals, the team was R.C.W.Burn (left-arm slow bowler, still at Oxford); T.G.O.Cole (who had played a couple of games for Cambridge without getting his blue, and had appearedonce for Lancashire in1904, scoring aduck against Leicestershire); G.H.Drummond (a banker, whose only first-class experience, oddly, was for MCC against Tasmania earlier in the year, though he played a few games for Northamptonshire after the war); C.H.M.Ebden (a right-hand bat who had won his blue for Cambridge in 1902 and 1903, and played for Sussex in 1904); C.P.Foley (who played eight games for Middlesex in 1904); H.V.Hesketh-Prichard; H.J.Powys-Keck (a fast left-arm bowler who had toured India with Oxford University Authentics and played two games for Worcestershire in 1903); G.H.T.Simpson-Hayward (the last of the underarm lob bowlers who, oddly enough, had also doubled up his surname, in 1898, but was a regular first-class player with Worcestershire); A.W.F.Somerset (aged 49, whose first-class experience lately had been the 34 He was, though, MCC president in 1920-21. 35 They also took their own umpire, John Moss from Nottinghamshire, who over a long career from 1894 to 1932 stood in 665 first-class matches. 36 Keith Booth, Ernest Hayes: Brass in The Golden Age, ACS Publications, 2008. One of the Gentlemen