Long battling with illness, Gervase Hannays finally lost the fight earlier this month.
Hannays was one of five Queen’s Royal College people who were true QRC servants. It would be no exaggeration to say that these five gave much of their lives to the cause of education through sport, almost literally in the shadow of the unique, stately Maraval Road clock tower.
Despite the recency of the July 11 date, it was not COVID-19, which has not been kind to anyone, including the vast QRC family, that claimed him. It did not get the others either. Lennard Kirton was lost only within the last year but, thankfully, not to the pandemic. And Rex Dewhurst, Randolph Bally and Lawrence McDowell had all departed before the turn of the century.
Hannays was what one former player described as a “spot coach.” He never had direct responsibility for any team or any programme. But he was an ever-present influence in QRC cricket and football, at least from the early sixties when Holly Carrington was the college football captain to as late as the mid-Oughts when cricket seemed to have begun to lose its age-old lustre for students of the college.
Consistently content to contribute off centre-stage if not behind the scenes, Hannays was always on hand to offer coaching advice wherever he perceived a technical problem to exist.
For instance, he spent hours with a player whose “cartwheel” backlift caused him often to close or open the face of his bat. Or, in football, convincing a player who would successfully get inside his defender on the right flank but was reluctant to let fly with his left foot when he had done so.
Former Guardian and Express sports editor Earl Best tells a 1994 story of how Hannays called him not long after Curtly Ambrose had cleaned up England for 46 at the Queen’s Park Oval.
He wanted Best to arrange to get a stack of copies of the Robin Smith photograph that (dis)graced the front page of the Guardian on the day after the Test. The photographer had caught Smith in what looked like a near-perfect forward defensive shot.
But Ambrose’s delivery had knocked his middle stump clean out of the ground.
Hannays reasoned that the photograph was the perfect way to convince young players that “technique is also about timing.”
Brian “Christian” Bain, who succumbed to an aneurysm over a week ago was among those who benefited from his sempiternal lectures and his individual coaching. As did three who preceded Hannays to the Great Playing Field in the Sky, Jesse Blackman, Larry Springer and Sheldon Gomes.
But there are those who remain, the Sadaphals, Vernon “Sam” and his brother Ellis “Chool” Carrington, Roger “Colt” Matthew, Ian “Jeff” Jeffers, Patrick “Rabs” Rabathaly, Garnet Harris, Valentino “Tino” Singh, Keno Mason, Irving Ward and Curtis Williams, who have no doubt whatever about the size of Hannays’ unstinting engagement with and massive, unselfish contribution to improving the lives of the college’s sportsmen.
He had no contract or no formal commitment, he received no tangible reward. But this scion of renowned jurist Sir Courtenay Hannays had received an education of which he was justifiably proud. And it was his duty, he felt, to give back.
So he came, he saw and he consistently contributed. As a “spot coach.”
