Hayes has rarely been short of characters and one of the earliest was Hughie Hart. Born in Wigan in 1893, he left school at 13 to work for the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway Co.  He went into the army in 1915 and married the daughter of a Harlington police inspector. After the war he settled in Hayes and worked for GWR. Despite his small size, he joined Botwell Mission as a goalkeeper in 1920 and took over from Tom Holding, when the latter joined Southall.  Even so, he was considered competent enough to be selected for Middlesex in December. During his two complete seasons, he won two league championship medals and Middlesex Senior and Charity Cup medals. In all, he played 76 games. At the 1922 AGM. Hugh was elected Club Secretary, but something happened and he left on a matter of principle, and was playing for Windsor & Eton in September. He obviously enjoyed committee work, however, for he was an active member of the NUR and in 1928 was elected as Labour member of South Ward on Hayes Council and became its vice-chairman next year.  He continued in the NUR until 1948, when he joined the Ministry of Insurance at Southall – a case of poacher turning gamekeeper.  He retired at 60 in June 1953 and sailed for Canada to visit his daughter, but, while there, he died of a heart attack in Toronto in September 1953.  He lived at 102 Wimborne Ave. 

Les Hartridge was a midfielder, who played alongside Bobby Hatt in the Slough team which won the Athenian League under Bob Gibbs. He joined Hayes from Wycombe (7+1 apps.) in summer 1970, but was haunted by a long string of injuries and unable to play for his new club until the 1971-2 season. However, he was a member of the team which defeated Bristol Rovers in the FA Cup in 1972. He was chosen as Player of the Year at the end of the 1973-4 season, and went to Wokingham 1974.In his three full seasons at Hayes, Les made 133 appearances and scored 9 goals.

It was always a feature of amateur football that gifted players who happened to go to distant universities played for clubs which were near to their colleges. One such player was Brian Harvey. An outside-left, who had already played for his home-town club Yarmouth Town, he was a student at London University and made four appearances for Hayes in 1952-3, filling in when Ted Hornsby and Robin Long were unavailable. Later he played at Walthamstow Avenue and won an Amateur Cup winner’s medal against West Auckland in 1961.

It is one of the sadnesses of studying non-league football that players whose praises would have been sung if born a half-century later, go almost unmentioned in modern hagiographies. JE Harvey, known as “Twilly” for unknown reasons, was an inside-forward, who made 46 appearances between September 1927 and December 1928 and managed a tally of 37 goals. He made his debut in the abandoned final of the West Middlesex Cup against Southall Reserves, scoring once in a 3-3 draw, and then made the inside-left position his own, forming a productive left-wing pairing with TC Davies. His last game was the 2-9 league record defeat at the hands of Chesham on 22 December 1928.

John Hastings is an attacker, who has the knack of scoring some sensational goals - his equaliser at St Albans in August 2003 was an example of chasing a lost cause on a touchline, winning the ball in a tackle, ghosting past defenders and, finally, planting the ball in the net. Unfortunately, he lost confidence through a brutal tackle at Uxbridge, which left him with a broken jaw and the need for a metal plate to be inserted in his skull, and was not well handled subsequently by management, resulting in him leaving for Tooting & Mitcham United, where he scored six goals in one of his first matches. After making his debut with a goal as a substitute in the FA Cup at Grays in October 2002, he made a total of 18+17 appearances and scored eight goals.

Before John Hastings, there were three others of the same name, brothers – I have been unable to find if John is related to them. Neil Hastings was the oldest, making four appearances in the forward line for Hayes in the 1960-1 season. A pupil of Mellow Lane School, he first played for Southall and then joined Hayes in January 1961. He resigned from Hayes in September 1962 and joined Hounslow Town. In 1968 he was playing for Wembley.

A younger brother, Stuart Hastings, captained the Hayes side in the FA Youth Cup in 1967-8, but failed to make it through to the first team.

Neil’s youngest brother, Maurice Hastings, played for Hayes in 1968-9, while still at Mellow Lane School, where he was Head Boy. He made the substitute’s bench on three occasions, although it is not certain that he actually played.

If I had to nominate Hayes’ player of the 1970s, it would be a toss-up between the flair of Robin Friday, the goalscoring of Cyrille Regis and the graft of Bobby Hatt. Before joining Hayes in 1970 at the age of 28, Bobby had already played for Maidenhead United, including the 8-2 FA Cup mauling of Hayes in 1961, Hounslow Town, Slough (where he earned a league championship medal under Bob Gibbs), and Wycombe Wanderers. In addition, he had been on the books of West Bromwich Albion as a teenager, and played regularly for Reading reserves while he was at Maidenhead. A 6-foot defender or midfielder, he joined Hayes from Slough via Walton & Hersham, which he considered too far to travel from his home at Woodley, Reading. Within months of his arrival at Church Road, Bobby took over the captaincy and always seemed to enjoy the responsibility. He was particularly close to his mentor, Bob Gibbs. While at Hayes he was selected for the Athenian and Isthmian League teams, London FA, Bucks & Berks FA (he represented his county 29 times), and Middlesex Wanderers, including a tour of Japan. Although he trained with the England amateur squad, he was unfortunate not to gain a cap. But his greatest moment was when he scored the only goal of the game against Bristol Rovers in the FA Cup in 1972 (pictured below), when Hayes gained their first ‘scalp’ in the competition. In 1974, with his mentor gone, Bobby joined Wokingham Town, claiming that the 40-minute journey from his home was wearing him down. But as soon as Bob Gibbs was reappointed manager, Bobby was back. He stayed a further nine months until the combination of travel and his own age – he was now 33 – persuaded him to see out his playing days at local Wokingham. Bobby played a  total of 260 games and scored 39 goals – but one is remembered over all the others.

In Bobby’s penultimate season, 1974-5, he was joined by his namesake, Pat Hatt. Pat was not related to Bobby, nor did he scale his heights. He was a local, from Cowley, and did not start playing in senior football until 1973-4, when he was already 27 years old, having previously represented Yeading and North Harefield United in the Middlesex League. A draughtsman at the Admiralty, he played 6+4 games for Hayes, scoring three goals, including the only goal of the game on his debut in an FA Cup tie. He returned to North Harefield in January 1975, and later played for Ruislip Manor and Uxbridge.