The compiler much regrets that the limited space allotted to the Australians’ matches in this book precludes the possibility of giving a lengthened account of this famous contest. He must therefore rest content to put on record the following facts anent the match: That in the history of the game no contest has created such worldwide interest; that the attendances on the first and second days were the largest ever seen at a cricket match; that 20,814 persons passed through the turnstiles on Monday, 19,863 on the Tuesday, and 3,751 on the Wednesday; that fine weather favoured the match from start to finish; that the wickets were faultless; that Mr. Murdoch’s magnificent innings of 153 not out was made without a chance … that the fielding and wicketkeeping on both sides were splendid; that a marvellous change in the aspect of the game was effected on the last day; that universal regret was felt at the unavoidable absence of Mr. Spofforth; and that England won the match by 5 wickets.
Grace had set the tone by scoring 152 and then wagering Billy Murdoch that he could not beat his score. Murdoch managed to do so by one run, achieving 153 not out while carrying his bat for Australia in the second innings. Grace gave him the sovereign that was owed and Murdoch continued to wear it on his watch chain for the rest of his life. He even held onto this memento after bankruptcy had led to the dispersal of all his other goods. Grace’s tribute to Murdoch’s innings was marvellous. ‘It was,’ he said, ‘a triumph for him to have not only exceeded my own fine score of 152 by 1 run, but also to have achieved the distinction of being not out, and I take this opportunity of congratulating him most heartily and sincerely in print as I did at the time verbally, on having enrolled his name for ever on the scroll of cricket fame by his gallant achievement.’ This is Grace at his most attractive and effective. A great competitor, a generous player, a man who settles his debts, a man who admires skill in others and a master controller of his own image, which was one reason for his enormous celebrity. He was simply very good at what he did.
Grace saw a market for cricket, and for his cricketing prowess in particular, and he wanted and needed to cash in. His competitiveness and skill drew in the crowds and this made it economically attractive for the promotors of games to pay him handsomely. He was also more than a very large cog in a machine. By the 1870s, his position as secure as it would ever be, he would regularly put together scratch teams and take them to play matches across the country. For this, he would be paid as much as £100, most of which amounted to pure profit, in its day no small sum of money for a freelance player. To achieve these amounts he was always a fierce negotiator. When Lord Sheffield first proposed that second tour of Australia in the southern summer of 1891–2, Grace demanded a fee of £3,000, plus expenses, plus the fare for Agnes and their two youngest children. Sheffield agreed, calculating that he could, such was the cult of Grace, make his money back even on such an enormous initial outlay. It was enormous. While it is difficult to convert nineteenth-century prices into current values a useful rule of thumb is that in those days a pound had a fixed gold value, with a sovereign being worth £1. Today the value of gold in a sovereign is £225, which means Grace’s charge for that second and last tour in today’s value of gold would be £675,000. This is less than today’s cricketer at the highest level would be paid but it does provide a more accurate flavour of the amounts of money that the leading player in the world was able to charge towards the end of the nineteenth century. Grace was competitive and he liked money but how curious that these days sportsmen are not viewed, much less judged, through the same lens.
For all of his self-confidence, even bumptiousness on the field, he could be a kindly and generous man off it, especially when he was engaged in his other life as a general practitioner. For he did at last qualify from medical school by 1878. Having completed his training he was able to spend time, though not much, ministering to the ill. His habit was to send in the smallest possible bills to his poorest patients and he cultivated a gruff if friendly bedside manner. It must have been slightly peculiar having the most famous man in England swinging his stethoscope at your bedside. His first biographer, Methven Brownlee, noted, ‘From early morning until late in the evening you will find WG toiling at his profession, trudging through rain, sunshine and storm as cheerful as if you were playing cricket, so his diligence is not in doubt even if he was no more than a competent GP or at least his medical standing was not as high as his cricketing standard.’ Brownlee’s Cricket (1891) is to all intents and purposes hagiographical and is not wholly reliable but there is no reason to doubt Grace’s methodical attention to his medical job on those occasions he was obliged to do it. Such passages supply a useful corrective to the dominant narrative of a man as grasping and ungracious as he was driven.
He also had an important place as a role model. To cricketers he was inspirational. In an edition of Wisden in the tributes recorded in 1896, Grace’s peer Allan – A. G. – Steele of Lancashire wrote, ‘I shall never forget the kindly encouragement I, a young cricketer, received from WG the first time I met him’, while George Harris, Lord Harris of Kent, added that ‘the old man is the kindest and the most sympathetic cricketer I have ever played with. As I said in proposing his health some years ago at a banquet the Kent County Club gave in his honour, I never knew a man make a mistake in the field but what WG had a kind word to say to, and an excuse to find for him, and I doubt if I could conclude with anything in praise of my old friend which would be truer or more gratifying to his feelings than that.’ Invited contributors to a volume who were specially commissioned to celebrate a cricketing life would be expected to offer friendly remarks. In focusing upon Grace’s kindness and generosity, especially towards other players, these gentlemen were very likely to be telling the truth.
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The level of Grace’s celebrity is hard to imagine for a cricketer today. Perhaps society is more fragmented, and therefore no individual figure can be so overwhelming, but as Richard Tomlinson notes in his excellent biography, the British Library’s online newspaper database produces about 43,000 articles about Grace for the period from the 1850s to 1899, which is more than double the number for Sarah Bernhardt, the most famous actress the world has ever known. Grace possessed an indefinable star quality. This meant that the crowds flocked to see him and this perhaps explains some of his eagerness to make money, because others were able to make so much money out of him. To give one small example, in 1873, in advance of a game between the United South and the 22 of South Oxfordshire, the promoter doubled the entry to the cricket ground at Thame from sixpence to one shilling just because Grace was there. The hike did not deter the crowds. Gate receipts were £276 against expenses of £135, increasing the profit from £3 to £141. In other words, a forty-seven-fold increase, thanks to the presence of one man. The same swelling of the crowd at the Melbourne Cricket Ground or The Oval made considerable the profits, which means that Grace’s attitude made perfect sense and was entirely reasonable.
Grace’s popularity could not only be shown in attendance figures at matches but also through the desire of advertisers to use his image. The advertising campaign for Colman’s Mustard epitomises this ability to monetise Grace’s image. It survives very clearly today in the public consciousness. In the end, such advertising worked well for Grace even if, in the course of his career, he had not been good at taking financial advantage of such events. When the Daily Telegraph in 1895 launched a ‘shilling testimonial’ to celebrate his career and especially his one hundred centuries, it raised £5,281 9s. 1d. Individual contributions flooded in from across the country. Even schoolboys sent their pocket money to pay tribute to W. G. Grace. This is an indication of his stature, popularity and visibility. When he played in his own Jubilee match celebrating his ability to play first-class cricket at the age of fifty, 17,500 turned up to watch.
He became not only the most celebrated cricketer but one of the most popular celebrities of the whole of the nineteenth century, conceivably only outplayed by the Queen herself. This inevitably created the myth ar
ound Grace and some wonderful stories grew up about the unwillingness of W. G. to leave the crease. On one occasion when he was bowled he suggested to the umpire, ‘It’s a windy day today’, implying that the bails had only tumbled because of the weather. The iron-willed umpire replied, ‘Yes, and I hope it doesn’t blow your cap off on the way back to the pavilion.’ Such a story reflects both the positive and the negative sides of this extremely determined character and it is also the case that such apocryphal stories are only told about great figures.
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Grace was in some ways the model of a Victorian. This was certainly the case in physical terms, for his strength and fitness was the classic picture of robust Victorian manhood, and he had the confidence and strength to add reality to the image. This would have counted for very little without his genuine brilliance on the field, a brilliance that has arguably never been surpassed. As is the case with many of his contemporaries, a lack of historical context has lessened his stature in recent decades. We have found it too easy to forget that Grace lived in a pragmatic age which has sometimes appeared to later generations as hypocritical. The Victorians loved the outward signs of gentility, epitomised in the form of the amateur who need not be paid, but they also recognised, or most of them did, the need for people to profit from their enterprise, to make a decent living.
This was after all an age of business success whereas our present society, being more tiresomely censorious, is more inclined to criticise Grace for working with the grain of the society in which he lived, rather than seek to overturn that society. How could he have tried to do so when the risk was so high? Had he failed to create a new cricketing culture, what might have been the result? Perhaps the greatest player of the day might have found himself banished from the game for good. This would have been bad news for cricket. Instead, this man of ambition and pragmatism and drive, who built a business and a brand in the face of all the odds, who worked with what he had and who stands as the original face of today’s cricket, deserves to be saluted. Without him Test cricket may never have started and it was mainly a commercial endeavour.
In this Grace was a businessman. He would most definitely have been keen to embrace T20 or 100-ball games, so long as the ground was full and he was paid ‘expenses’.
Victoria: Pole Star
Finally, the book ends with Her Imperial Majesty Queen Victoria (24 May 1819–22 January 1901). The end of the story, its beginning and everything in between. The reference point and the pivot on which the other Victorian lives have turned. The wife and the mother, the Queen and the Empress and the subject of dozens of books and, more recently, films and television series too. An enormous amount is known about this long-lived woman and this long-reigning monarch. This is owing in part to the labours of generations of scholars and historians but in the main to the Queen herself, who left such a legacy in the form of journals, letters and documents, reams of paper upon which she wrote her thoughts and opinions and observations. She opined on the Empire and on its various regions and territories and on Britain itself as well as Ireland. She had firm views on the laws formulated and on the politicians who governed in her name. There had never previously been a public figure who was observed so intently and who observed so intently and who watched so much herself. Who bequeathed such a record and who stamped her presence and her opinions indelibly upon her era.
The Queen influenced so many lives. Each of the men whose lives have been traced in this book glanced back over his shoulder at Victoria. Some met her in person, indeed, some spent altogether too much time in her company. Others never met her but all of them regarded her as a reference point, a moral and cultural pole star who guided their work and directed their own sense of identity and purpose. ‘The history of the Victorian age will never be written,’ sniffed Lytton Strachey but he was wrong there, as he was so often elsewhere. The story of the age has been written and rewritten many times but it revolves around Victoria herself. This is the story of the symbol and of a culture but also a story of the woman herself, in all her guises.
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A glance at the family tree of the Hanoverian Royal Family demonstrates the strange and improbable nature of Victoria’s accession to the throne. There should never have been a Georgian succession crisis. George III had more children, fifteen in all, than any other British monarch and the line of succession should have been so long as to quench any prospect of Victoria finding herself at its head. Yet, for all that there were fifteen possible new families still to come, there turned out to be a surprising dearth of legitimate candidates for the throne. This meant that the British public was treated to an unseemly race between his children as they tried to provide a grandchild to succeed. They tried but largely failed so Victoria, and, as it turned out, the British nation, was the winner.
George III was the third of the Hanoverian line, brought over from Germany to occupy the British throne following the death of Queen Anne, who had no surviving children in spite of at least seventeen pregnancies, she the last of the Stuart monarchs. George III was the first of the truly British Hanoverians, the first to be born in Britain, the first to speak English as his native language and the first never to set foot in Hanover, the principality over which he also reigned. ‘I was born and raised in this country,’ he said, and ‘I glory in the name of Briton.’ Victoria herself had a very good understanding of what the Hanoverians were for and just as importantly what they were not for. As she noted coolly, it was all to do with
the duty which is imposed upon her and her family, to maintain the true and real principles and spirit of our Protestant religion; for her family was brought over and placed on the throne of those realms solely to maintain it.
This was code for the sort of reflections that a Queen could not discuss aloud. That the Hanoverians were, or ought to be, in the business of supplying legitimate heirs to the throne, which in turn meant that the illegitimate offspring that were something of a Georgian speciality, had to be quickly forgotten about.
George tried to ensure a smooth succession by means of the Royal Marriages Act of 1772 but his assiduous efforts almost backfired. The remarkably silly Act drew up the most stringent rules possible concerning Royal marriage candidates. Pitt the Elder criticised the Act’s provisions as ‘new fangled and impudent, and the extent of the powers given wanton and tyrannical’ and the Act almost had the consequence of ending the line. To avoid domestic factionalism, George opposed British and therefore non-Royal wives. Thus, between a slew of illegitimate children and various mad, unhappy, absent, unfortunate or unwilling albeit Royal foreign and lawful wives, the dynasty almost failed.
In the end, only one young princess blocked the unwelcome prospect of the Duke of Cumberland, George III’s unpopular and reactionary fifth son, acceding to the throne. Even then this was only thanks to a dashing young German princeling from the pettiest of states. The young princess was Charlotte of Wales, who is the tragic reason we have a Victorian age to look back on. Loved by the people as much as her father, the Prince Regent, was held in contempt by them, Charlotte was heir presumptive, had charm, looks and no brothers. The dashing young German princeling was Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld,fn1 the finest husband the Almanach de Gotha could offer.
Sadly, in 1817, Charlotte died in childbirth. She was only twenty-one and her infant son was stillborn. Her husband and her country were bereft. This calamity set in train the disagreeable contest in the course of which various aged Hanoverian roués put aside their mistresses and common-law wives and sought instead someone who could be married. Now that Charlotte was dead and gone, who could marry and supply an heir in short order? This was a game the whole family of Hanoverians could play.
Essentially, they were playing for cash rather than behaving out of patriotic duty so this was the reason for this frenzied drive to sire a legitimate heir. It was not the result of a dream to have a descendant occupy the throne. Rather, success at the game held out the prospect of what most of them sought more dearly th
an anything else. An heir would bring money, because Parliament had voted an allowance to the father of an heir to the throne and money would bring a rescue from the bankruptcy that was an all too common family trait.
Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, was the fourth son of George III and he won this game. He was in so much haste to marry appropriately that he settled on a comparatively elderly thirty-two-year-old widow for his bride. Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld was the sister of Leopold, and she had two children already from her previous marriage to Charles, Prince of Leiningen. The choice of Victoria demonstrates clearly the extremely narrow field of candidates available to Edward and his brothers by the terms of the Royal Marriages Act. The couple married in 1818 and to save money the Duke took his new bride back to Germany, which was cheaper to live in, and only in the seventh month of her pregnancy did they return to England. Kent was in debt so deeply that he drove the carriage which brought them back to England himself, for he was unable to afford a driver. Victoria, as Queen, would still be settling her father’s debts twenty years into her reign.
Alexandrina Victoria, names perceived to be so unpleasantly foreign that MPs for years thereafter petitioned to have them changed, was duly born at Kensington Palace, British-born and an heir at last, although at this point still only fifth in line to the throne. The Duke of Kent died in 1820 and the Duchess, who was still not rich, almost moved back to a cheaper Germany. Only the counsel of the canny Leopold, still an immensely popular figure, which was attested to by the Field Marshal’s baton he had been given, the dignity of ‘His Royal Highness’ which he was permitted to use and, perhaps most galling to the greedy Hanoverians, the £50,000 per annum pension Parliament allowed him, persuaded his sister to remain and to raise the princess in England. Although her succession was not assured, Leopold knew that there was every chance the infant Victoria would ultimately become Queen. How much better for her, for the monarchy and for the country, that she be raised in Britain as a Briton, like her proud although sometimes mad grandfather before her.
The Victorians Page 35