Lives in Cricket No 8 - Ernest Hayes

Chapter Two Surrey Pro we’ll talk with them too / Who loses, and who wins; who’s in, who’s out Shakespeare, King Lear Surrey: 1896 That first first-class match was brought closer on 20 May 1896 at The Oval when, batting at No.3, Hayes scored Honor Oak’s first double century, 210 not out in a total of 313 for two against Surrey Colts’ 273 all out. Honor Oak’s innings occupied just 140 minutes, the first wicket falling at 31, so Hayes was scoring in excess of a hundred runs per hour. The Daily Chronicle suggested that some of promising youngsters, like ‘Mr’ Crawford, Joshua Lohmann, Thompson and Smith might be tried against Oxford University in The Parks. Particular reference was made to Hayes, a ‘young player who featured in the ‘Next Seventeen’ match’ and who ‘seems to have a speciality for making centuries’. In the event, Thompson played, though he had first appeared a couple of years earlier in 1894, Crawford and Smith made their débuts in the return match at The Oval and Joshua Lohmann never made it, for reasons that were mostly to do with the strained relationship between the club and his more famous older brother. Hayes, however, had to wait until almost the end of the season, stepping on to the field as a member of the first eleven when his now long-overdue first-class début came against the Australians at The Oval on Monday 17 August 1896, exactly one week after the match in which England had beaten the same team on the same ground to ‘retain The Ashes’. Not that the media or contemporary reference books attached any significance to that. Indeed it does not get a mention, the importance of that four-inch urn being imposed retrospectively on those early Anglo-Australian fixtures. 17