Lives in Cricket No 8 - Ernest Hayes

Chapter Three Coaching in South Africa and then a County Stalwart ‘one of the big players of the immediate future’ South Africa: 1898/99 Notwithstanding almost permanent political turbulence in South Africa from the Boer Wars through apartheid and beyond, there has always been a healthy symbiosis between South African cricket and English professionals. For the former, particularly in the nineteenth century, there was a huge advantage to be gained in learning from the experience of those from the ‘mother country’ and for the latter the opportunity of escaping an English winter, enhancing their earnings and benefiting from contact with a different culture and social structure. George Lohmann is the best known and had a significant influence on early South African cricket, but to his name can be added those of Fred Holland, Alfred Street and now, Ernest Hayes. Previous tours of English teams, all privately arranged at this time, had been undertaken by Major R.G.Warton in 1888/89, Edwin Ash in 1891/92, Lord Hawke in 1895/96 in the immediate aftermath of the Jameson Raid and Lord Hawke again this same season, as South Africa moved inevitably and inexorably towards the Second Boer War. Some of these tours were of commercial intent rather than with the idea of raising the standard of South African cricket. The scrapbook annotations reveal Hayes as a man and a young one at that, whose interests extended beyond the tunnel vision of cricket and its immediate hinterland, as he describes the island of Madeira, the one stop on the way to Cape Town, his three days in that city and the majesty of Table Mountain. When he later arrives in Port Elizabeth, he is less impressed by the surrounding countryside which he describes as ‘deserted and barren in appearance’. He comments that ‘The Cradock cricket ground is 26