Lives in Cricket No 8 - Ernest Hayes

Life on board ship was pleasant enough and although most at some stage suffered from what Hayes delicately called mal de mer , there were sports such as quoits and potato races, nets and a cricket match of sorts against the ship’s officers. He reports enthusiastically: ‘Instead of running we had chalk lines across deck at different distances, hitting the ball over which counted one, two, three or four. Our opponents were not nearly strong enough, and we won by 271 to 51.’ Other entertainment was provided on the way out by Mr F.R.Benson’s Shakespearean touring company, who acted the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet and a scene from The School for Scandal . Although West Indian cricket at the time was inevitably dominated by white men, as they had the time and the money, the presence of black and Asian players was tolerated – and indeed welcomed – if they were good enough, although club cricket in Trinidad, for example, was segregated by social class and social divisions followed racial lines. The divisions were not, however, as watertight as those experienced by Hayes on his earlier trips to South Africa. West Indies cricket did not have Test status. There is a reference to cricket being played in the West Indies in The Pickwick Papers (1836) and the origins of inter-colonial cricket can be traced back to a match between Barbados and British Guiana on the Garrison Savannah in 1865. There had been a tour to Philadelphia and Canada in 1886 and to England in 1900. English teams had visited the Caribbean from 1894/95 and although the two matches against West Indies on Lord Brackley’s trip were designated ‘Tests’ by the press, West Indies had to wait more than two decades for official Test recognition. The party landed at Kingston where the weather was delightful, the heat tempered by a cool breeze and although Hayes found the buildings ‘old fashioned and disappointing’, he was impressed by the ‘electric car service’ and the ‘wild flowers in full blossom, beautiful ferns of all kinds of species, palms and cactus and orange trees full of fruit’. There can be no doubt that the locals embraced the British-introduced sport of cricket with enthusiasm, though at this stage principally as spectators rather than participants, but with time and a different, cavalier, approach, they would later in the century be the game’s greatest exponents. Overseas Trips and Chaos at The Oval 45