Lives in Cricket No 29 - AN Hornby

45 Albert and Ada were married on 17 October – the feast day of St Ethelbert – at the Parish Church, Oatlands, near Weybridge in Surrey on an unseasonably warm autumnal morning. The Reverend John Richard Armitstead officiated. He was Hornby’s brother-in-law and a fellow cricketer, who played a number of games for Cheshire. The couple set up home at Bridge House, Church Minshull, a village six miles north of Nantwich. The 1881 census records that they lived there with their four sons – aged three, two, one year and six months. There was also a staff of five servants made up of Annie Wiley and Maria Wormleighton, both nurses, Laura Snow, a housemaid, Maria Rose, a cook and 53-year-old Thomas Halsey, a butler. It all sounds rather grand but servants, of whom some 1.4 million were employed at that time in the United Kingdom, were not expensive additions to the family’s outgoings. Laura Snow would have been paid as little as £24 a year, while Thomas Halsey, the butler, might have received an annual income of around £50. Annie Wiley and Maria Wormleighton, the two servant nurses, were at the bottom of the food chain as far as wages were concerned, earning between £10 and £15 each per annum for looking after the Hornby boys. Hornby would also have probably employed a head groom or stable master at between £30 and £50 per year and a number of stable lads, each costing between £6 and £12 per annum, to look after his string of hunters. With a large estate to oversee, Hornby would also have called on the services of a number of gardeners and odd job men. The 1881 census records Albert’s occupation as Captain 1 st Royal Cheshire Militia. He received his commission in 1877 and apparently resigned in 1888. In 1887 the family moved to an address in Nantwich, Parkfield in Wellington Road, where they lived until Ada’s death in 1927. It had 16 rooms and was set in about 20 acres. According to a sketch in the 30 August 1887 edition of the Athletic Journal , ‘cattle grazed in total ignorance of the grandeur of their surroundings’ and there was also ‘a farm yard, which includes a piggery, duckery and henery [sic]’. In 1891 they had four female and two male servants, in 1901 two female and two male, and in 1911 four female. Playing the role of the local squire to a nicety Hornby would drive Married to Sport