Lives in Cricket No 8 - Ernest Hayes

Chapter Four Overseas Trips and Chaos at The Oval The heart turns to travel . . . Ezra Pound, The Seafarer South Africa again: 1903/04 Omitted from the MCC team to tour Australia, Hayes nevertheless decided to avoid the English winter by taking a long sea voyage by the east coast route to South Africa. He had friends in Cradock from five years earlier, family in Durban and his elder brother Arthur had fallen in the Boer War. He returned home via the west coast route thereby enjoying what he subsequently regarded as a ‘grand five months holiday’. Cricket was not on the original agenda, but such was his enthusiasm for the game that he could not spend time in a cricket-playing country without managing to play in a few matches. However, before all that, there was the thrill of the voyage and excitement at spending time in places of historical and geographical interest such as Antwerp, the Bay of Biscay, Lisbon, the Rock of Gibraltar, the Bay of Naples, the ruins of Pompeii, Stromboli, Port Said, the Suez Canal, Port of Suez, Aden, Kilindini, Mombasa, Tanga, the island of Zanzibar, and Dar es Salaam. With the last-named he was less than impressed: ‘It is very dirty as a whole the streets being no wider than a passage. Plenty of bazaars selling cheap jewellery, curios &c. Any amount of dirty looking niggers about and the place seems very smelly.’ An articulate and educated man, he demonstrates his ability to think outside the box of cricket with intelligent comments on most of the places he visits. He was, however, inevitably conditioned by early twentieth-century zeitgeist . It was the high noon of an Empire on which the sun had at this point in history shown no sign of setting and Hayes was able to write in the full spirit of British 39