On his several Australian tours, too, his irritation was wont to boil over periodically and this is part of the reason why his reputation in the country was of somebody more aggressive than was necessary. The row with the promotor William Runting, who had organised a match in Sydney between the England 11 and a New South Wales 18 during the ‘honeymoon’ tour of 1873–4, was sparked by the latter’s decision to ask Grace to delay the start of the final day’s play because the local team only needed 56 runs to win. A delay, he thought, would make the match more exciting for the crowd. Grace disagreed, vehemently. Reports at the time suggested that spectators had to intervene to separate the two, whose row developed rapidly beyond mere verbal aggression. Interestingly, the altercation actually led to Grace having additional work to do. The match ended earlier than planned, so to fill the remaining hours an exhibition game was rapidly scheduled, starring Grace himself.
His dealings with officials, even those on his own side, were equally high-handed and were sometimes tense purely because he had been thwarted in one way or another. One such incident took place when Grace double-booked himself to play both in a benefit match and for Gloucestershire in a fixture against Nottinghamshire. He resolved this clash in his own inimitable fashion. He simply told Nottinghamshire to change the date of its match and when the county refused Grace refused to back down. He announced that if Nottinghamshire insisted on going ahead, he simply would not play on the date suggested. He was a man who expected to be obeyed and his position meant that he generally would be.
This was an undoubted flaw in his temperament and it would sometimes have negative repercussions. It led to the miserable severing of his relationship with his home county of Gloucestershire. Grace was not good at letting the Gloucestershire committee know when he was and was not available. He had many other cricketing commitments but it was his responsibility to keep all parties informed. Eventually, in 1899, the county wrote to him to ask precisely when he would play, to the very great irritation of Grace, who replied coldly, ‘I have always tried my very best to promote the interests of the Gloucestershire County Club and it is with deep regret that I resign the Captaincy. I have the greatest affection for the County of my birth, but for the committee, as a body, the greatest contempt.’ Not surprisingly the committee found this more offensive than it could bear and Grace never played for Gloucestershire again, even though it was through him that Gloucester became a first-class county. He was well into the twilight of his career at this time but he remained a draw and it was a sadness that his association with his home turf ended badly.
To some extent his temper was born out of his competitive spirit and because he took cricket seriously. It was for him both a life’s work and perhaps rather more than a business that his temper could sometimes bear. This competitiveness was also on occasion comical, as in the incident during a Gloucestershire vs Surrey game in 1878, when a fielder threw in a ball which lodged in Grace’s clothing. Grace maintained that he could not touch the ball. After all, if he did touch it he would be at risk of being out handled ball. He therefore simply carried on running until finally the fielders managed to obstruct him. Not surprisingly he claimed the extra runs.
Sometimes his competitiveness shaded into courage and set an example to others. When batting for Middlesex against Yorkshire at Lord’s on a terrible wicket, it was said at the end of his innings of 66 that his legs resembled beaten steaks. One of the two Yorkshire fast bowlers, Tom Emmett, commented that he did not think that ‘WG had a square inch of sound flesh on his body after that innings’. A determination not to be out and to get as many runs as possible and to try to ensure that every wicket that could be gained was gained: this summed up Grace’s cricketing attitude and is part and parcel of the Grace legend. He was so successful because he was so competitive and the competitiveness cannot be taken out of his nature, but the reflection that this ferocity did inevitably sometimes cross over the line into gamesmanship is hard to avoid. The Australian team watching his behaviour at The Oval that sultry day in August 1882 certainly took this view. Nonetheless, it was an attitude of mind that improved the standard of cricket, not just in the teams in which he played but in the teams that opposed him. The Australians certainly noticed that they raised the quality of their game, precisely because they knew Grace would give them no quarter.
*
The degree to which sport and class were interwoven in the England of the nineteenth century has already been seen. Gentlemen were not paid to play and were expected to have an income outside the sport which allowed them to pursue the game. Professionals were paid. On the other hand, they were treated much less well than the gentlemen. One of the great fixtures each season was Gentlemen vs Players, an event in which Grace built a remarkable record over his long career. There was another layer in this complicated relationship, for not everyone who pursued a career as a full-time player could actually afford to maintain themselves without financial assistance, without receiving some form of emoluments from the game. In what was held to be a strictly amateur game, however, these emoluments had to be covered up in the form of putative ‘expenses’. The point being that these payments bore no relation to actual expenses. Instead, they were simply fees or salaries in a genteel disguise. This was a curious, hypocritical and unsatisfactory state of affair, scoffed all.
Grace squarely occupied this difficult position of needing money while being expected not to earn it. There were periodic outbursts of concern about it. In 1874, Captain Henry Holden, who was the honorary secretary of Nottinghamshire County Cricket and the Chief Constable of Nottinghamshire, wrote to MCC calling for a ‘proper definition … of the term amateur’, as distinct from professional. Fitzgerald, as secretary of MCC, replied that he was opposed to ‘anyone playing as an amateur who is essentially a professional’. His remarks were unfortunately leaked, and led to suggestions that Grace, for it was Grace’s position that was on the mind of everyone in the world of cricket, could not reasonably be considered an amateur by anybody.
This row had little effect. This clearly unsustainable situation nevertheless sustained itself. Four years later, the list of expenses for Gloucestershire’s match against Surrey at The Oval makes it clear that ‘expenses’ related to the quality of the player as much as anything else. Hence W. G. Grace received £15, G. F. Grace (Fred Grace) received £11, Walter Gilbert £8, Billy Midwinter, a professional and therefore not given the honorific ‘Mr’, £10, the umpire £6, the scorer £5 and Dr E. M. Grace (Ted Grace) £20. As it happens, Surrey on this occasion thought the claims bill too high and cut it back by £20 overall. Nonetheless it would have been very hard to justify the difference in fee on the basis of ‘expenses’. It was simply a code for a fee or salary which everyone knew. A degree of officially sanctioned humbug was tolerated then, just as it no doubt is today in many walks of life.
The unfairness lies in the damage done to Grace’s reputation. To add to this unfairness is the sense that his record as a cricketer has never been properly understood. By today’s standards, this record certainly is curiously patchy but it must remembered that he was playing within a different system. In the first place, he played fewer Test matches than players today but there were simply far fewer Test matches played. For example, the Australian tour of 1882 included only one Test, at The Oval, and as a result his record stands and falls largely on his first-class record, which is of much less interest today.
Secondly, batsmen’s averages have been considerably higher. Grace averaged just under 40, which compares unfavourably with Sir Donald Bradman’s 99.6 in Test matches and with the expectation that the highest-level batsman will average over 50. In terms of Grace’s bowling, the situation differs again. He bowled more of a side-arm action and took relatively few Test wickets and again this has made him look less compelling than the great bowlers of the present era.
In addition, it is perhaps forgotten that Grace played in the earliest Test matches at a time when it took several months for a team to travel
from the United Kingdom to Australia. In addition to which, such lengthy tours had to be financed privately. Inevitably this made them a much larger financial risk, so much rarer events. This is a key reason as to why Grace had no opportunity to play Test cricket at anything like the rate of professional cricketers today and this makes his first-class averages of overwhelming importance. This is where Grace’s remarkable dominance is shown and any fair evaluation of him must be judged against nineteenth-century standards and conditions rather than those of the twenty-first century. When this is done, his dominance and tremendous talent are unbelievable.
Grace’s achievements were stunning. He scored fifty first-class centuries by the age of twenty-seven. To place this in context, it has been calculated by the cricketing authority Irving Rosenwater that in the ten years prior to this, fifty first-class centuries were the total achieved by the thirteen next most successful batsmen. This level of dominance truly remains unprecedented and compares favourably with Bradman. Grace’s bowling was also remarkable. Aged only sixteen, he took thirteen wickets in a match for 84 runs. This was in the course of a match between Lansdown and United All England at Bath. All of the United England wickets fell to the Grace brothers, though one assumes that his elder siblings must have felt rather outshone on this occasion by their younger brother.
One of Grace’s most remarkable feats came just a couple of years later. In 1866, he was playing for England against Surrey at The Oval. He scored 224 runs, then the highest score anyone had made at The Oval, but that was not enough for Grace. Having batted for hours and run a total of 431 runs, as there were no boundaries at that time, he then hurried to the Crystal Palace in nearby Sydenham for a meeting of the National Olympian Association. He took part in the 440-yard hurdles, which he duly won, before returning to his game of cricket. Such incredible levels of sporting prowess are always unusual but as an all-round athlete Grace was one of the true greats. The prodigious feats continued. In 1868 at Canterbury’s summer festival of cricket, Grace scored two centuries in a match, 130 and 102, the first time a batsman had done this since 1817. As he got older and grew taller, the remarkable agility and fitness of his youth were forgotten. The enduring picture of the large and formidable figure of his later years has eclipsed his youthful athleticism.
His first annus mirabilis was 1871, when he became the first batsman to score more than 2,000 runs in a season. He totalled 2,739 and an average of 78.25, double the average of the next most successful batsman. He also scored 2,000 runs in the seasons of 1873, 1876, 1887, 1895 and 1896. In all, he scored 1,000 runs twenty-eight times in a season. This remains a record and the only player of recent times who comes close is Geoffrey Boycott, who managed this feat twenty-six times. Even this does not do justice to his dominance. In 1876, Grace scored 1,389 runs in August alone. He noted himself that this was ‘greater than any other batsman made in the whole year in first class-cricket’.
His greatest year was possibly 1876. He scored his first triple century, 318 not out for Gloucestershire in a fixture against Yorkshire and the highest score achieved until that date. In the course of that summer, he managed 2,622 runs in eleven-a-side matches and 1,047 in matches ‘against the odds’, that is, in which teams of eleven played teams of more than eleven. This ‘against the odds’ match was a regular feature of nineteenth-century cricket, when the stronger team would allow the other side to have more players. It is within this format that many think Grace’s ability to place the ball so precisely was honed. Even when there were as many as twenty-two fielders, he managed considerable accuracy and careful shot selection to maintain his prodigious scoring. Naturally, this is something that helped him in ordinary cricket as well. In addition to his first-class triple century, he also scored 344 in a twelve-a-side match. Incidentally, he made 400 not out in an ‘against the odds’ match although that was not in itself a record, as another player had managed 404 not out.
Nearly twenty years later Grace was achieving similar success. Aged forty-seven in 1895, he became the first batsman to score 1,000 runs by the end of May, a feat achieved by only two others, Wally Hammond and Charlie Hallows, in the history of first-class cricket. Others have scored 1,000 runs before the end of May but they had matches in April to help them. In the same season, he scored his 100th first-class hundred. He was the first batsman to achieve this feat and for his pains was presented with a glass of champagne on the field by the captain of Somerset, Sammy Woods.
The aggregate scores achieved in this latter phase of his career are even more remarkable considering his increasing girth, and the fact that he could not possibly have been so nimble between the wickets. The following year of 1896 was almost as good. He managed a triple century, and his bowling figures were not bad either, for he took 52 wickets for just over 24 runs each. Quite simply, nobody else has ever managed to match such all-round quality and longevity nor placed such a distance between himself and the player in second place.
These achievements also require further contextualisation as the quality of wickets was simply appalling. Lord’s only dispensed with its sheep and reluctantly purchased its first lawnmower in 1864. On occasions Grace found himself having to pick gravel out of the wicket on this supposedly hallowed turf. On one occasion, in 1870, the poorly prepared wicket led to tragedy. Grace carried his bat,fn1 scoring 117, while lamentably at the other end George Summers was hit on the head and died, the ball having bounced around erratically against everybody. The rolling of pitches was not agreed until the latter part of Grace’s career, when, and partly at his insistence, such elements in the game were standardised and professionalised. In other words W. G. achieved his incredible performance in an era when nobody else could match it on appalling wickets. As an indication of this, in the period in which he scored his first fifty hundreds, all the other batsman in England combined had only scored 109 centuries. Thus Grace had fifty of 159 to his own credit, or nearly a third.
As Grace commanded the heights of cricketing achievement, so he showed his distinctiveness in other ways. He used his brain and his analytic abilities, developing theories as to how to play, which he then tried to put into practice when coaching others. In addition, he knew how to use his charisma to popularise the game. He always wanted to play attractive cricket, even when this gave the Australians an advantage. As he told the cricket organiser Lord Sheffield, ‘It is the game I have tried to play all my life: it is the game every lover of cricket desires to see played, and it will be a bad day for our national game when it is given up, and a slow defensive game takes its place. Matches are played to be won, not lost.’ This commitment to attractive play was essential in making cricket into one of the great national sports, and it was essential too in establishing the ongoing rivalry between England and Australia and it made money, which Grace undoubtedly liked.
There were other elements in building what would become this wonderful rivalry and here too Grace played his part. In the course of his first, or honeymoon, tour of Australia in 1873–4, there were complaints that he had bet on the result of matches and that this influenced his behaviour. There were also complaints about the relationship between the amateurs and the professionals which upset the sensibilities of the egalitarian Australians. On top of all this, Grace’s extracurricular activities included shooting three kangaroos, which he presented as a romantic gift to Agnes. This made it seem as if he were not completely serious about the tour and it further antagonised the Australians. David Gower flying a Tiger Moth during the 1990–91 tour had a similar effect.
On the second tour (1891–2), matters were, if anything, worse and the rows even more preposterous. Even the toss at the first Test at Melbourne on 1 January 1892 caused a problem. Grace was suspicious of the penny produced by John Blackham, the celebrated wicketkeeper and Australian captain, for it was so worn that it was too difficult to tell one side from another. The ground was packed, 20,000 people were there for the first day and Grace, who lost the toss, tested the coin just to make sure it was not ‘w
eighted’. This is not a way to charm an opponent, even if Blackham was gentlemanly enough not to object too strongly.
Another of the rows concerned an umpire by the name of E. J. Briscoe in a match between England and New South Wales. Briscoe thought that the English style of appealing was too aggressive and he became irritable as a result. He then refused to give a catch behind the wicket. Grace, in his own recollection, told him mildly enough, ‘I wish you would pay attention to the game; we all heard the catch.’ Briscoe’s recollection of the exchange, however, was that Grace had been rather more forceful: ‘You will give no one out. It is unpardonable. You must be blind. We might as well go home tomorrow.’ Briscoe then left the field in a huff and the Australian newspapers had a field day. Grace was obliged to defend himself, remarking in Sydney, ‘I did not insult Mr Briscoe, nor did I think him a cheat’, adding later from Adelaide, ‘I did tell Mr Briscoe that his decision was unpardonable, and that he must pay more attention … I did not insult Mr Briscoe, nor do I think him a cheat, but, I am sorry to say, he is not a good umpire.’ With that, he took ship at Adelaide and left Australia, never to return.
The essentially good-natured passions continue between England and Australia to this day, with each side fond of digging the other in the ribs with a rigid index finger when the chance presents itself. The taunting amusement that occurs in England when the Australians are found to have used sandpaper on their cricket balls perhaps derives from the heightened sense of competitiveness generated in Grace’s time. It charged up the battery of this rivalry and its currents are still flowing today. It is no wonder that, if looking back at the August day in 1882 at The Oval, the circumstances of the game have never been forgotten. With luck they never will be.
Later in life Spofforth, the Demon, and Grace became the best of friends and perhaps the origins of the Ashes can be traced back a further two years, to a Test at The Oval in September 1880 in which both of these marvellous cricketers played their part with gusto. The witty and wise Wisden report is worth quoting at length:
The Victorians Page 34