Lives in Cricket No 8 - Ernest Hayes

In the trial match at The Oval on 10 and 12 May, between Mr E.G.Hayes XI and Mr F.T.Badcock’s XI, Hayes had 15 and 90 – Hobbs had 106 and 118 – and was ‘glad to find that I could still bat all right’. However, against the Australian Imperial Forces XI: After playing for half an hour, Australians batting, I fell on my shoulder in trying for a catch & strained a muscle so badly that I could not play for weeks. Returning to the side against Oxford University we won by an innings and 47 runs & I scored 40, but could not bowl or throw my shoulder being painful. It may well be that a separate incident, unrelated to cricket, contributed to the injury. It is known that Hayes was proficient at billiards – according to popular myth the sign of a misspent youth, though there seems no evidence of that in his case – and in his time in South Africa, he had acquired some skills in horsemanship, but an attempt to combine the two skills seems not to have been successful. Under the heading ‘A Losing Hazard: A Cricketer’s Race Round a Billiard Table’, a local newspaper reported: Mr Ernest Hayes, the well-known Surrey cricketer, is more skilful as a batsman than as a horseman, particularly when his mount is a Shetland pony. This was proved when he accepted a challenge by a Mr H.Knight for a race round the billiard table at a Hounslow hotel. The conditions were that Mr Knight should run and that Hayes should be mounted on Mr Knight’s pony. The inevitable happened soon after the start. Mr Hayes was thrown. If he was not exactly shot into baulk, he was most certainly ‘out of play’ and the victory went to the challenger. His last match for Surrey, his five-hundredth for the county, was an away game against Kent at Blackheath on 25 and 26 July, in which batting at No.5, he scored one and seven. He muses, rather sadly, ‘The next match v Kent at Blackheath . . . proved to be my last in county cricket. I had been missing catches owing to my fingers 17 & still could not bowl & throw so therefore decided to retire from first-class games.’ An Officer and a Gentleman – and a Bridegroom 90 17 Wisden later attributed this contracture to catches taken early in his career off the fast bowling of Richardson and Lockwood. However, he took rather more off Lees, Hitch and Rushby among quicker bowlers and ‘Razor’ Smith in the slower department, as can be seen in the Appendix.