Whether it was or was not cricket Grace’s breaking of the stumps that day changed the course of the game’s history. His actions added another layer to the story of Grace’s own life and to his legacy too. He was playing to win that day and he paid for it. He was barracked for the remainder of the Test, which Australia won by seven runs. He paid for it in other ways. He was sensationally popular at this point in his career, the first global superstar, yet his decision to break the stumps that day at The Oval added to the sense, in some quarters and in posterity too, that Grace was not the gentleman he might have been. This was also the first time that England had lost to a colonial side on home ground and a few days later the Sporting Times ran a mock-obituary ‘In Affectionate Remembrance of ENGLISH CRICKET, which died at the Oval on 29 August 1882 … N.B. – The Body will be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia’. The story of the Ashes was born but this was not even the most significant aspect of that Test at The Oval.
It was Grace who had magnified and had maintained right out in the open his own competitive edge and who in so doing had created discomfort and an edge to a game that rather gloried in its gentlemanly image. He was a true professional, hungry and ruthless and he helped to shrug a dead hand from the shoulder of cricket, a weight that was keeping the game back. He achieved something else too, which was to begin a process of dispelling a miasma of hypocrisy that was in the process of staining the name of cricket.
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William Gilbert Grace was born in the famous Year of Revolutions in Europe and it is difficult not to ascribe a note of interesting coincidence to this fact. His parents were Henry and Martha Grace, who lived at Downend, where the suburbs of Bristol met the fields of Gloucestershire, and he was one of eight children, five boys and three girls. His next oldest brother, Ted, became the E. M. Grace to Gilbert’s W. G., both famous and highly accomplished cricketers, with reputations that spread far beyond Gloucestershire. Henry Grace was a doctor and he played a crucial role in all his children’s sporting activities. He became interested in cricket, eventually establishing his own team but long before that he had set up a practice field in the garden of the family home and it was here that the Grace children first learned the happily complex rules of cricket. Martha Grace too was steeped in the game, although the tales of her close involvement in her sons’ sporting development carry a touch of myth. However, it is certainly the case that she was the first and for years later remained the only lady to be listed in Wisden’s chronology of births and deaths of cricketers.
The young W. G., Gilbert to his family, was therefore wrapped up in cricket practice, cricket lore, cricket rules and cricket culture and in family competition. Indeed, it would have been against a context of capable young cricketers that he was first introduced to the game. No doubt there would have been a little sympathetic bowling to him when he was an infant but most of the time he is likely to have been a fielder or even a ball boy, thus helping ensure the smooth flow of the game for the benefit of his father and elder brothers. As he grew older, he would have had a greater share in the batting and the bowling but with so many brothers it is not surprising that there was a need for all-rounders. After all, in a family game specialisation is awkward. In this way he competed and grew competitive and it is this competitive streak that appears and reappears throughout his history of his life.
Did he feel destined to become a professional cricketer? Hardly. His family background was professional, but professional in the sense that a profession ran in the family. That profession was not cricket but medicine. This was seen as the way the Grace boys might make their way in the world. They were a professional family but in Victorian terms, and in class terms, this meant that there was little family money as such and that they would have to earn their living. The young Grace could not conceive of becoming a gentleman cricketer, with private resources on which to draw. This was simply not part of the scheme of his life. In any case, the notion of professionalisation was a fraught concept in Victorian England.
Gilbert grew into a slim but athletic teenager, with a sharp mind. Not that the latter has always been picked up by historians of cricket, some of whom have stuck to the peculiar idea that Grace, because he was apparently born in rural Gloucestershire rather than a Bristol suburb, was in essence a horny-handed son of the soil, an ‘instinctive’ cricketer, a rustic with a ‘simple, almost puerile mind’. This last, astonishingly, was the verdict of the official history of the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC), published in 1987. He was analytical and creative and this was the case not only in cricket but in all aspects of his life. He ignored the rule book if he could see a better way of doing things. In other words he was essentially self-made and this created problems in Victorian England.
Grace went to boarding school at the age of ten, not to Eton or even Harrow or any of the other illustrious public schools the names of which are sprinkled across the pages of this book, but to Ridgway House near Bristol, which was able to offer sound, solid educations to the sons of local families who could not dream of more illustrious educations for their offspring. Here too the route trodden by Grace and his brothers was neither privileged nor deprived but somewhere in a difficult-to-categorise middle. The Ridgway school fees, though by no means high, were a stretch for the family. Henry Grace was obliged to think always of his income, to answer each and every call placed to him by a patient, and his children were well aware of how hard their parents worked so that the younger generation could have the best possible start in life. It is clear that money, a liking for money and a fear of not having enough of it, all occupied significant parts of Grace’s psyche and it is important too to stress that this interest in money was very reasonable.
In 1864, at the age of sixteen, Grace was removed from Ridgway, possibly because his parents could no longer afford the school fees, and spent the next year at home, studying under a tutor. He was destined for a medical career. Until a few years previously, it had still been possible to serve an apprenticeship with a doctor, with his father Henry Grace in this case, before completing a brief formal training course at medical school. This was the inexpensive path followed by Grace’s elder brothers but now the regulations had been updated. W. G. himself would have to spend almost three years in formal medical training in order to qualify. He did qualify in the end but it took him nearly eleven years to do so.
The reason was cricket. By now both Ted and Gilbert Grace were recognised as superb young players. They had amassed much experience at local level but there were serious obstacles to the young Grace achieving his ambition of playing at the highest level of the game. For one thing, Gloucestershire at that time was not a county team. There were only seven such teams and each operated strict rules on residency and family ties. Ironically, only MCC itself, the original club and the sport’s regulatory body, offered a possible route to the top. Ironically, because the club was a byword in those days for sluggish administration, antediluvian attitudes and a ground at Lord’s that, with its field grazed by sheep and its ramshackle facilities, was far from being the best ground in the land. Yet MCC was the only club which did not operate a residency bar, meaning that the Grace brothers could aspire to play at Lord’s. What was the problem? There was none on paper but a problem existed nonetheless and it had everything to do with class and with hidebound attitudes that were holding back the game of cricket. MCC was a bastion of amateur cricket, in a world that was straining at the professional leash. Moreover, the gentlemen who sat on the MCC committee were, alas, unlikely to accept the membership applications of the sons of a middling, jobbing doctor from the Bristol suburbs.
As it happened, chance would intervene to smooth the path of E. M. Grace towards top-flight play. A conversation in the summer of 1862 between the Grace parents and an MCC committee member revealed a problem. MCC had organised a cricket festival at Canterbury, beginning the following day, but the team was a man short. Henry Grace proposed that Ted step in, on condition that he also be permitted to play for Middlesex
in a county match against Kent the following week. It was a deal and Ted had his foot in the door. The Kent team grumbled at the presence of this non-amateur player in an amateur fixture. It was implied that Ted was socially inferior and that he played cricket for money, which was definitely not cricket. Ted did, however, make the team, played supremely well and he was duly admitted to MCC’s hallowed halls.
Regrettably, his presence at Lord’s was still seen by many at the club as an embarrassment. He was socially inferior, he did play for money and his mere presence underscored the existence of what became known as shamateurism, the presence of ostensible amateurs who were in fact earning a fee. Ted’s presence might have made it easier for his younger brother to join MCC too but it might also have made the process more difficult. In the meantime, the Grace brothers had become symbols of the tensions vibrating at the heart of this archetypal gentleman’s game. The Graces had little option but to work with the system as best they could even if this system was problematic. They had no other choice. It was beyond their capacity to overthrow the existing order, even if they wanted to do so. This question of shamateurism endured for and set an undertone to much of Grace’s career.
Several years passed, during which Ted proved his worth to MCC and was selected to travel on a tour of Australia but it was not until 1866 that W. G. himself was at last admitted to the club. He had to show his class on the field again and again. This included two staggering centuries at The Oval, until MCC felt obliged to embrace this young genius. The committee’s hostility to shamateurism remained as potent as ever but the hypocrisy which surrounded this stance was becoming ever more glaringly obvious. Money was being made under the gaze of all and people could only avert their eyes for so long. At last, an MCC committee member, Robert Allen Fitzgerald, noted in his book Jerks in from Short-Leg that the situation was intolerable. It was time ‘for the gentlemen cricketers of England to assert their position, not merely as patrons of the game, but as performers’. The word performer was unlikely to please some of the more traditionalist committee members, who were already in sharp reaction to events in the world outside, among them banking troubles, factory disturbances and the death of Albert that had caused the Queen to vanish into the shadows of her grief, but Fitzgerald’s point was well made. Finally, in May 1869, W. G. Grace became a member of the Marylebone Cricket Club. This was the first necessary step on a road to stardom.
The sense of security that came with club membership obviously served Grace well. In the years that followed, he hit centuries at a prodigious rate. In July, the Daily Telegraph wrote rapturously:
He knew exactly where every ball he hit would go. Just the strength required was expended and no more. When the fieldsmen were placed injudiciously too deep he would quietly send a ball halfway towards them with a gentle tap and content himself with a modest single. If they came in a little nearer, the shoulders opened out and the powerful arms swung round as he lashed the first loose ball and sent it away through the crowded ring of visitors until one heard a big thump as it struck against the furthest fence.
It is no surprise that the cricket impresarios began to circle, sensing a profit to be made, and no wonder that Grace, being a professional and in need of money, welcomed their advances. When a proposal was made to tour Australia in the southern summer of 1869–70, Grace was keen to accept. Ted had returned with tales of goldrush Melbourne and Victoria that sounded, as Grace’s biographer Richard Tomlinson put it, ‘rather more interesting than Bristol on a rainy day in February’. It made perfect sense. There would be no cricket to be had for the whole of the northern winter and Grace had to make money. Nor could MCC realistically object, since it was now paying him euphemistic ‘expenses’, that is, a fee for each match.
As it happened, the plan collapsed. It was a rainy Bristol that winter but the proposal did Grace no harm. It made it abundantly clear now that he was a paying proposition, thus normalising his stance as a proto-professional cricketer and helped to flush out the remaining opposition. It also emboldened Grace himself to seek appropriate remuneration for what was becoming his full-time occupation. Furthermore, the mere fact of his presence in Britain enabled him to consolidate his position as a star. He was rather more available to journalists and photographers than he would have been in Melbourne, even in the new world of telegraphs and comfortably rapid communication.
At Christmas 1871, Henry Grace died suddenly at the age of sixty-three, thus depriving his son of one of the most significant influences in his life. This made another problem press upon him instantly. It was one which underscores his status as a self-made man and not an amateur gentleman player. He was forced to face the fact that his mother might not now have enough money to live on, that he and his siblings were obliged now to consider the question of finances with even greater seriousness. When fresh proposals were made for lucrative tours of Canada and Australia, made on the strict proviso that Grace would be on the team, he considered them with more than usual attention.
The story of these negotiations highlights starkly and disagreeably the criticism that Grace faced, then and since, for being in the position of having to earn a living. He delivered an ultimatum to the Australian consortium charged with luring him to Melbourne. A fee of £1,500, plus his expenses, a tremendously large sum at the time and, as it turned out, beyond the capacity of the organisers, meaning that he went to Canada instead. Much of the criticism that was turned on Grace hinges on his Australian demand. It shows that he was greedy beyond the dreams of avarice; that he was grasping, disgracefully so; that he was manifestly not a gentleman and so on. Such arguments fail to take into account just how unpredictable Grace’s earnings were and they also fail to recognise just how large an amount of money the Australians were hoping to make out of him. Most of all, there is a heart-sinking snobbery in this scolding of Grace for seeking to maximise his worth or perhaps for failing to be born a gentleman, with his own money already in the bank.
Grace’s tour of eastern Canada – a tour of the north-eastern United States, including a visit to the then cricket citadel of Philadelphia, was added at the last minute – contained no great moments of cricket but it did what it was supposed to do. It provided a decent payday for Grace. This was just as well, for he was returning to a fiancée and a marriage plus a tour of Australia which was planned for the following year. More than ever he needed the money to live the life that he wanted and that his bride-to-be may have hoped to enjoy.
Grace had become engaged to Agnes Day early in 1873. She was a distant relation and her branch of the family was even less financially stable than his, although the reasons for their economic want verged on the sensational. As already mentioned, Palmerston, the liberal-minded Foreign Secretary in the 1848 Year of Revolutions, had struck up an unlikely and in the minds of British diplomats, to say nothing of the Queen and Prince Albert, decidedly unwelcome, friendship with the Hungarian nationalist leader Lajos Kossuth. Agnes’ father William Day, a lithographer, had also crossed paths with Kossuth and he had printed a run of illegal banknotes to assist the Hungarian. When the Austrian authorities discovered what had happened, they sued Day, with the result that the family was financially ruined. Grace and Agnes Day married in early October 1873 and a week later the happy couple joined the team at Southampton, for Agnes had obligingly consented to look upon the southern tour as an extended honeymoon. When they sailed, the team discovered that Grace and the handful of other ‘amateur’ players were billeted in first-class accommodation for the duration of the two-month cruise to Melbourne while the professionals were forced to endure cramped and smelly steerage quarters below decks. These arrangements proved more evidence, not that it was needed, of the class distinction at the heart of the game.
Agnes has left little trace. It is assumed that she burned the correspondence she had had with her husband, for none has survived. However, it is possible to glimpse a woman with a steely core, one well able to keep a family together and to keep the show on the road. She was ce
rtainly the spine of family life. Her unorthodox honeymoon was the first of two tours of Australia, the second with her children in tow. There would be tragedies ahead for the Graces. As so many Victorian families discovered, death was never far away and two of their children predeceased them. Their eldest son William (known as Bertie), who was also a promising cricketer, died after an operation for appendicitis in 1904 and a much-loved daughter, Bessie, died in early 1899 of typhoid fever.
A secure and happy family background is not, of course, a guarantee of an easy and regular temper and it is certainly the case that Grace could on occasion be extremely overbearing. He had a fierce temper and this could sometimes be brought into full flame by something simple or absurd, such as when, in May 1889, he instructed that a notice be erected at the Gloucestershire County Ground at Ashley Down. The notice proclaimed that practice was forbidden because it has been raining, not an unusual occurrence in English summers. Grace then discovered that some young people had disobeyed the notice and had been playing in the nets and he exploded with rage. So extreme was his anger, indeed, that he had to apologise to the club president, writing, not very apologetically, ‘I was sorry I had struck the boy, but that nine out of every ten persons would have done the same under the provocation.’ The parents were not enormously happy but were persuaded not to take the matter any further. No doubt many forceful characters have been tempted to behave in a similar way but Grace by this point was not merely a forceful character, he was also a prominent national figure and an altercation with schoolboys would not have burnished his reputation.
The Victorians Page 33