Lives in Cricket No 26 - HV Hesketh-Prichard

7 Chapter One India, Jersey and Edinburgh Hesketh Vernon Prichard, as he then was, was born in India in 1876; his father was an Army officer. In Victorian or Edwardian England it was crucial to know where you stood in terms of class and social status, so it is just as crucial for the biographer to understand too: and to understand where Hesketh comes in this picture we have to start with his family. There were strong links with British India (and with Ireland) on both sides of that family, particularly on his mother’s side. The family background also illustrates just how mobile the Victorian middle classes could be, long before international travel became less than an adventure. His parents, Hesketh Broderick Prichard and Katherine Ryall, met and married in India, but had arrived there from different backgrounds, though both families could claim an aristocratic heritage somewhere in the distance. The immediate common thread was the Army. Katherine’s father was Browne William Ryall. He had been born in St Croix (now in the U.S. Virgin Islands, but then a Danish possession) in 1826, the son of Edward and Catherine Ryall, who owned a substantial sugar plantation. After Edward’s death, Catherine returned to the family home in Stradbally, County Laois, in Ireland and Browne was educated there, presumably tutored at home. In 1844 he was working in London as an articled clerk for his uncle, but by 1846 he had taken a plunge and had joined the East India Company in Madras as a cadet. ‘John Company’ ran the subcontinent with the support of the British Empire somewhere in the background. The opportunities for profiteering were not what they had been in the days when the company ‘nabobs’ accumulated vast fortunes through graft: the impeachment of Warren Hastings in the 1780s, even though it ultimately failed, had shown that there were limits, but up to the time of the 1857 uprising the Company was in charge of most of India and, crucially, possessed its own army. It also for many years had a monopoly on the sale of opium to China: something else supported by British arms. Browne married Ellen (or Eleanor) O’Brien on 23 April 1850 at Gwalior in central India, about 200 miles south of Delhi. Ellen’s father, Peter O’Brien, was the Surgeon-General to the Bengal Army, which was under the command of the East India Company until 1858. Katherine (later always known as Kate) was born on 7 June 1851 at Gwalior. She was only a few months old when her mother died, and from her account she was then mostly looked after by her O’Brien grandparents. Long after Peter O’Brien’s retirement he and his wife Anne were to be important in Hesketh’s life. In 1857 came the Indian uprising, or ‘Mutiny’ as it used to be known. Gwalior was the site of a major battle in 1858 towards the end of the uprising,