Lives in Cricket No 8 - Ernest Hayes

staff just failed to overhaul the total of the Lords, as the school team styled itself. One novel feature was that in response to the perpetual debate in cricket circles about the balance between bat and ball and in particular correspondence in The Times suggesting that the bat was becoming over-dominant, the experiment of a fourth stump was introduced. On a shirt-front of a pitch which caused the reporter to suggest that the groundsman would be a candidate to prepare pitches for timeless Tests, it seems to have made very little difference, never caught on and was soon confined to the vast archive of cricket curiosities. The public schools, of course, reflected in many ways the curious class distinctions of English society, but Hayes, having played through the amateur-professional divide during his twenty-season first-class career seems to have surmounted that barrier with ease. Interestingly, there is an item totally unrelated to cricket in an adjacent column which describes one way in which the class-barrier was broken down. Two hundred public-school boys had attended a military training camp with a similar number of factory workers: Each must have wondered a little what ‘the other people’ would be like; each modestly resolved perhaps to be generous to the faults which so clearly existed on the other side, but after a few days of life together, with class distinctions obliterated by the levelling influence of shirts and shorts, and a common enthusiasm for games, ‘the other people’ soon became a meaningless phrase. Those who came prepared to break down a barrier popularly supposed to exist, found that it melted away without being touched at all. Whatever lessons might have been learned from the exercise, they do not appear to have crossed the page where both school and staff, including future cricket historian H.S.Altham, have full initials, usually two or more, occasionally four, with the odd ‘Rev’ and ‘Hon’ thrown in and Hayes, appears simply as ‘Hayes’. All the members of the staff team were, of course, simply employees of the school. Later that year, his school commitments over, he continued to score runs for Honor Oak in the handful of matches in which he played, including 114 against Forest Hill. Against Heathfield, he made 89 from a total of 219 and took three wickets for seven. It An Officer and a Gentleman – and a Bridegroom 97