Lives in Cricket No 8 - Ernest Hayes

work again, but financial considerations aside, there remains a psychological void which needs to be filled. However, despite the benefit system, more significant in days before today’s wider availability of pension schemes, most cricketers have generally entered their post-retirement years, needing to do something else to earn themselves a crust. In the nineteenth century it was even more difficult and many were faced with the prospect of ‘the workhouse or the river’, a number dying by their own hand. Nowadays, the ECB, the PCA and the players themselves are alive to these issues and there are more opportunities available in radio and television punditry, administration, and coaching. Umpiring has always been open to former cricketers, but not all are temperamentally suited to it. At the time Hayes retired from cricket, the beginning of inter-war economic depression, the licensed trade and coaching were among the options. He tried both with no small degree of success, having failed with a sports accessories business, Louis, Hayes and Co, at 10 Sandland Street on the corner of Bedford Row, just behind High Holborn in Central London. Nothing remains of it now, the site being occupied by an office of the Open University. Contemporary advertisements include a range of equipment, including balls, spikes and batting gloves. One aspect was successful, however, the ‘Ernie Hayes’ Scoring Book’ which remained on the market for a number of years. As a consequence of his business failure, with no immediate prospect of regular employment, he approached the Surrey committee who, in November 1921, agreed to liquidate the funds from his benefit invested by the Club’s trustees on his behalf in the Union Pacific Railroad Company. Having always been involved in charity work, particularly in the form of end-of-season charity matches for local hospitals, he became Honorary Secretary of the Blinded Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Appeal. It was not a post he held for very long, however, relinquishing it on his later appointment at Winchester College and being succeeded by G.L.Jessop, whose approach to batting was not dissimilar from his own. He was still capable of making a significant contribution to club cricket, however, and for the first time in two decades, played regularly with Honor Oak, although he had appeared for them 92 An Officer and a Gentleman – and a Bridegroom