Lives in Cricket No 8 - Ernest Hayes

More significant in cricket’s social history than the result, however, though suppressed subsequently in Wisden and James Lillywhite’s Cricketers’ Annual , were the events which preceded the Test and dominated the press in its early stages. Four Surrey professionals – Bobby Abel, Tom Hayward, George Lohmann and Tom Richardson – along with William Gunn of Nottinghamshire – had challenged the establishment in the form of the Surrey Committee by ‘demanding’ a fee of £20 rather than £10 for appearing in the match. Their case was incontrovertible. The fee had been at the same level for nigh on twenty years, international cricket was attracting huge crowds and the Australians were being paid considerably more, as were the amateurs in the form of ‘expenses’. The committee, however, was having none of it. What was at the time, and subsequently, referred to as the ‘strike’ was in industrial relations terms nearer a lock-out. The rebels were replaced. Abel, Hayward and Richardson subsequently backed down, but Lohmann and Gunn held out. Two years later, however, the fee was doubled. The battle had been lost, but the war had been won. In none of this was the young Ernie Hayes remotely involved, but it was part of the ethos of the Surrey dressing room he joined. His dressing room did not include amateurs Mr W.W.Read and Mr K.J. Key, who would have their own more luxurious accommodation to go with titles and initials on the scorecard, not just their surnames as would Hayes and his fellow professionals. From the start, he would be aware of the amateur-professional divide which was to characterise the first-class game throughout the whole of his playing career and indeed nine years beyond his death well into the following century. The match itself petered out into a fairly uninteresting draw, but Hayes, batting at five, distinguished himself with an almost chanceless 62 and three catches and was clearly not overawed at finding Abel, Hayward and Richardson among his team-mates and Ernie Jones, Trumble, McKibbin, Giffen and Harry Trott in the opposition. The frustration at not making the first eleven earlier comes through in the annotations to his scrapbook, though he derives obvious and justifiable satisfaction from his performance against the tourists. For the second eleven, he scored 57 not out against Northamptonshire, 44 against Lancashire, 47 against Hertford- shire and 109 against Bedfordshire. He writes: Surrey Pro 18