Lives in Cricket No 8 - Ernest Hayes

Chapter One Childhood and Early Cricket ‘ . . . the great Honor Oak players of the past, like Ernie Hayes . . . possibly the most famous of them all.’ Micky Stewart, in his Foreword to the Honor Oak C.C. Centenary booklet , 1965 Ernest George Hayes was born on 6 November 1876, the youngest of the five sons of Christopher, a master draper, later a hosier and haberdasher, and Jane Hayes in Peckham, in the cricketing county of Surrey, which, after several local government boundary changes, now forms part of the London Borough of Southwark. He died, aged 77, only a few miles away in West Norwood, so in the words of Surrey spin doctors and PR people when they wish to emphasize the merits of local managers and players against those of upstart Australians and ‘Kolpaks’, he was ‘Surrey through and through’. There was, however, a lot of living in between. His maternal grandfather was a cheesemonger; his paternal grandfather a floor cloth manufacturer, the precursor of a broader-ranging drapery and hosiery business, providing a family background which was respectable lower middle-class. The family had a penchant, well ahead of the Education Act of 1870, for improvement and upward mobility, as demonstrated by Ernest’s father being sent to boarding school at St Nicholas’ College at Hurstpierpoint in Sussex. In 1876, Queen Victoria was just over half way through her reign, the Empire was approaching its zenith and, apart from a little skirmish in the Crimea, Britain had been at peace since the Napoleonic Wars and ‘led the world’. The Boer War at the turn of the century and two devastating World Wars before the half-way point of the next one were to change all that and when Ernest Hayes departed this life, just six months after the coronation of the young Queen Elizabeth, Britain was a very different country. A period of post-war recession and depression heralded the 9