Lives in Cricket No 8 - Ernest Hayes

dismantling of an Empire on which at his birth it was said the sun would never set. The family home was 795 Old Kent Road, an epicentre of East End London, with the 1871 Census recording it as the residence of Christopher and Jane with Ernest’s four elder brothers, Christopher, William, Charles and Arthur, aged at the time four, three, two and six months. There was a six-year age gap between the rest of the family and Ernest. The 1881 Census shows little change, except that Ernest is there now aged four, and the eldest brother Christopher Daniel, named after his father and, incidentally his grandfather, is visiting his uncle Robert Newham, one of his mother’s eight siblings, in Chigwell. The presence of a domestic servant (not the same one) in both censuses suggests an existence two or three levels above the breadline. In his famous poverty survey of 1889, Charles Booth characterises this particular part of the Old Kent Road as ‘middle class’ and ‘well to do’. Ernest’s childhood home is no longer there, having been superseded by a ‘Land of Leather’ megastore. Ernest was educated at East Dulwich College (or Grammar School, as the contemporary Post Office directory has it), a small commercial establishment on East Dulwich Grove at Carlton House, Southville Park Villas, with Mrs George Williams as its principal. It was an institution which seems to have provided him with the ability to write legibly in correct and understandable English, with almost infallible spelling and punctuation. He recalls 10 Childhood and Early Cricket The scrapbooks were always carefully written, even after his cricket had ended.