W Maynard (first name unknown) was an inside-left in the original Botwell Mission team. .He was a prolific goalscorer, although his achievements have mainly been lost in the mists of time. He is known to have played at least nine games between 1910 and 1912, and to have scored at least 16 goals, but our records are so fragmentary that both figures would certainly be higher. He was a member of the teams which reached the final of the Middlesex Minor Cup in 1910-11, and which won the competition in the following year. In the semi-final against Hayes Athletic in March 1912 he scored a hat-trick – but we do not know the scorers in the final or in the earlier rounds.

No such doubts exist about our next two entries. Russell Meara was Hayes’ goalkeeper for the Isthmian League championship season and for the first three seasons in the Conference. He was a great shot-stopper and, although diminutive for a keeper, most people here today would rate him among Hayes’ best – had he been taller, he would have succeeded at a much higher level. However, he could hardly have made a worse debut, when he was sent off on the opening day of the 1995-6 season at Bromley for handling outside the penalty area. But he soon made up for this lapse by keeping his charge intact for 714 minutes during September and October. Born at St Albans in 1974, he joined from Wokingham Town, having previously played for Watford, Southampton, Barnet, Aylesbury United, and St Albans City. He had already been voted Players’ and Supporters’ Player of the Year at St Albans, and was chosen as Hayes’ Player of the Year in 1996-7. He made the last of 209 appearances for Hayes at Easter 1999, when he left the country for his work.

Christian Metcalfe joined Hayes from Harrow Borough for a fee of £4,000 in January 1998. He had already suffered a broken leg at Harrow and his stay at Church Road was disappointing, largely owing to his proneness to injury. Indeed, in two and a half seasons, he made only 47+10 appearances, scoring three goals. But one of his goals was memorable – the equaliser in a grudge match against Conference champions Cheltenham Town in April 1999. It was quite typical that, when he followed the exodus to Stevenage in 2000, he should be injured while playing in the garden with his nephew and thus miss the start of the season with his new club. After Stevenage, he played for Woking, St Albans, Northwood, Slough and Hanwell Town (2006).

Our next entry, Mortimer J Miller, never played a single game for Hayes – or for anyone, come to that – but had a bigger positive impact on the club than most players and justifies the title of this series as ‘Hayes Men’ and not ‘Hayes Players’. Already treasurer and a committee member at Wimbledon, he was company secretary of the Hayes Cocoa Company (later Nestlé), and had been invited by John Brown to get involved with Botwell Mission in 1926. He regretfully declined, but pulled strings on the Mission’s behalf. Numbering Athenian League officials among his acquaintances, he advised Brown to get the club’s name changed from Botwell Mission. Through Brown he obtained housing for RG Rowe (father of the table tennis-playing twins) in return for his transfer from Wimbledon; he also found a job for Jack Maskell, another Don, at the Cocoa factory, after which he joined Hayes. Finally, he was elected to the Hayes committee in 1930 and set about building a team of ‘his boys’ for the first season in the Athenian League. But he exceeded all expectations. With a team almost entirely made up of established newcomers, Hayes went all the way from the preliminary rounds of the Amateur Cup to the final at Highbury against Wycombe Wanderers. During this season he became Deputy Chairman and John Brown’s right-hand man – but this caused resentment among the other committee members, who felt that they had been snubbed. At the AGM in 1931 he was elected general secretary unopposed, as he was a year later, after Hayes had finished as runners-up in the league and won the London Senior Cup for the first time. But in March 1933 he suddenly resigned after ‘failing to see eye to eye with the Team Selection Committee’ – not the last time that this happened at Hayes. In November 1936, when WH Holmes resigned owing to his business taking him away from the district, Miller was offered the secretaryship and accepted. He immediately threw his energy into driving up attendances – the result was a bumper 5,500 for the visit of Walthamstow Avenue on Christmas Day. But Miller’s stay lasted only until September 1937, when he resigned after a disagreement on the management of the club. The following summer he was elected secretary of Uxbridge FC, after that club had been obliged to resign from two leagues (Athenian and Spartan) in consecutive seasons for breaking their rules. Unsurprisingly, Miller did not last long in this capacity – in December he announced that he had ‘lost all interest in the club’ because of ‘continued muddle and persistent opposition to any resolutions’ that he brought forward in the interests of the club. Thereafter, he took only a distant interest in football. On his retirement, he moved to Worthing, from where he tried to intervene in Hayes’ decision not to continue to run a team during wartime, and wrote a fascinating article in the Hayes News in March 1957 during the club’s successful pursuit of the Athenian League championship. He died in 1959 at the age of 82.

His namesake and younger contemporary WL ‘Dusty’ Miller was a winger or inside-forward, who came to Hayes in 1931 from Tillings Athletic in Kent. He stayed for two and a half seasons, making 32 appearances and scoring nine goals. His ability was never doubted – he had several games for Charlton Athletic in 1932-3 – but he was subjected to barracking at Church Road, and played his best football away from there. During the following season he had a successful trial with Dulwich Hamlet, a powerhouse of the amateur game at that time, and joined them in time to participate in their Amateur Cup run to the final against a Leyton side which included Tom Holding and Eric Caesar. In the final, Miller was badly concussed in a collision with one of his own side and played only half the match – in fact, the game ended with Dulwich having only nine men on the field and a further two ‘walking wounded’. But he had the satisfaction of a winner’s medal. In March 1935 he transferred to Wimbledon, and was playing for Sutton United by May 1936.