Lives in Cricket No 8 - Ernest Hayes

intermittently whenever he had the opportunity to do so. One newspaper pressed for a comeback after an outstanding performance when he was guesting for City of London in 1920. Under the headline ‘Surrey Could Do With Him’ it reports: ‘Ernest Hayes, who served Surrey well for many seasons, is playing finely in club cricket. He turned out on Saturday for City of London against Hounslow and in addition to making 122 not out took six wickets for 18 runs.’ A return to county cricket was not an option, of course, the levels of skill and fitness for six-day-a-week cricket being quite different from those enabling a player to get by on Saturday afternoons. Winchester College: 1922 Hayes, clearly accepting that his first-class career was over, covered a couple of pages of his scrapbook with a summary of his career, listing his first-class centuries, all but three of them for Surrey, and adding a further 30 for Honor Oak and other teams. There was no money in club cricket, however, at least not in the unleagued south with its amateur ethos, and following the failure of his business, he was doubtless relieved to accept in 1922 a position of coach at Winchester College with its two and a half centuries of cricket tradition in succession to Schofield Haigh who had died the previous year. At the college his coaching was under the direction of Rockley Wilson, a couple of years his junior, who was still turning his arm over for Yorkshire in the August holidays. Douglas Jardine, with whom he was to work at Surrey a decade later, had left the school three years earlier. In his time at Winchester, Hayes helped bring on the talents of J.L.Guise, who first played for Middlesex shortly after leaving school in 1922 and G.S.Grimston, who played for Sussex from 1924. Later in 1922 he returned to Honor Oak, played in the cricket week, had four fifties in four matches, and later 131 against Bromley Town and 181 not out against W.T.Cook’s XI in an hour and twenty minutes in a mid-week fixture. He continued to play in end of season charity matches, for example for a Wimbledon and District team against J.B.Hobbs’ county team for the Wimbledon and Nelson Hospitals. The Athletic News lapsed into nostalgia: 94 An Officer and a Gentleman – and a Bridegroom