Lives in Cricket No 8 - Ernest Hayes

former now described as a ‘Manager (Ladies’ Underclothes)’ and the latter a ‘Millinery Warehouseman’. For Surrey, the season was a disappointment. They won only seven Championship matches, finishing sixth in the table: they failed to record a win in their last thirteen matches. Hayes didn’t reach a thousand runs in the Championship, putting him a street behind Abel and Hayward who both reached 2,000. Despite his aggression, he was perhaps a run of the mill county pro in the competition, with 959 runs at 25.23. One game was abandoned without a ball bowled – his colleague Bill Lockwood’s benefit match against Yorkshire on 25, 26 and 27 July. A replacement fixture was organised outside the championship for mid-September: Hayes would have cause to remember this later in his career. His aggressive approach to batting, nevertheless, continued to impress. One press cutting reports, ‘Hayes is the type of young man in a hurry, and he has neither the strength nor inclination to play a slow game.’ He twice scored a hundred runs before lunch on the opening day of a match, exactly 100 against Oxford University at The Oval at the end of June, and 108 against Leicestershire in early September. It was something of a mixed season. He had a pair against Lancashire; later, against Kent, he scored 0 and 1, stumped by his erstwhile Honor Oak colleague, Fred Huish, in the first innings and bowled by Colin Blythe in the second. By contrast, however, he recorded three centuries; his highest, 121, was in the Oxford match when he shared a partnership of 162 with Fred Holland. Until now critical comment from the press had tended to concentrate on Hayes’ batting and occasional bowling skills, but he was a regular in the slips, taking five catches in an innings in the season’s opener against London County, and attracted the plaudits of C.B.Fry, an astute observer of the game as well as an outstanding practitioner. He writes in the Daily Express : ‘The Surrey fast bowlers are lucky to have such an accomplished short-slip as Hayes, a strong rival of R.E.Foster for premiereship in that position.’ Demonstrating another dimension to his talents, he acted as umpire against Cambridge University at Fenner’s, for the first and only time in a first-class match. Hayes was 24 and his colleague Bob Carpenter was over 70, a curious contrast, at the time perhaps 34 Coaching in South Africa and then a County Stalwart