Lives in Cricket No 51 - Rev ES Carter

26 Chapter two Ealing Days – Curate and Cricket Edmund Carter came to Christ Church in the town of Ealing, Middlesex in December 1870. He was one of several curates to the Reverend Joseph Stephen Hilliard. The Rev Hilliard, a Cambridge scholar, born in February 1827, and 18 years older than Edmund, had been Vicar of Christ Church since 1859 and he took on the living of a church dedicated in June 1852, and designed by Mr (later Sir) Giles Gilbert Scott. The church, still very much in the centre of Ealing, has a tall 189-foot tower and spire and was described in Annals of Ealing by Edith Jackson in 1893 as being ‘a singularly beautiful example of the Gothic Style - the geometrical decorated style’. Hilliard remained vicar until his death in 1895 and in his time in Ealing established four more Church of England churches. Hilliard’s memorial in the churchyard records that he was ‘a man of singular courage, whom no difficulty daunted, nor did any wrongdoers escape his just rebuke’. There is a splendid oil painting of him, firm of countenance and with piercing eyes in Ealing Town Hall, painted by Ernest Hartley-Ford. This was the clergyman whom Edmund Carter was to serve for more than four years, and it is perhaps appropriate and comforting that Hilliard also had an enthusiasm for cricket. Yet it remains unclear why Carter chose to start his vocation in the Diocese of London and not the Diocese of York, and why he commenced his life’s work within the Church of England in a town then on the fringes of London. Family connections and friendships, and the opportunity for cricket, may have been the answer but this is merely conjecture. It was not long before Edmund Carter was settledwith his family, at 25 Windsor Road, in the heart of Ealing. He arrived with his wife and his young son, Edmund Sardinson Dashwood Carter, born in the autumn of 1870 at Slingsby, the then home village of the child’s grandfather William Carter. 25 Windsor Road was and remains a grand and large terraced house, then in a prime part of the former Ealing Village. The house was also occupied by Edmund’s brother-in-law Charles Bladon, two female servants