Gilbert: The Last Years of WG Grace

by Charlie Connelly

  In three months he’d turn 60. Sixty! In his mind he felt as young as ever. Even his 50th seemed only a couple of years ago but where first the years, now the decades were flitting by like never before. For as long as he remembered he’d mapped his life in cricket seasons, commencing net practice as early as the weather would allow and then spending almost every day until the Scarborough Festival in September either playing or travelling to and from matches. The last three or four years had seen a gradual reduction in his playing commitments but he still woke early on a match day, the excitement in his stomach the same as it had been when he was a child. Agnes commented each spring how his eyes would regain their sparkle when he came down for breakfast on those early season match days.

  It had been the same that morning, the first match morning of the season. Even a glance out of the window to see the trees being whipped back and forth by the wind and hearing the smack of sleet against the windows couldn’t dim the flame of excitement that heralded the start of another season.

  ‘Gilbert, you’re definitely at your happiest when there’s a cricket bag packed and ready by the front door,’ Agnes had said, looping a strand of hair back over his ear and brushing his cheek with the back of her hand as he set about his plate of eggs.

  He looked back from the window at his team and rubbed his hands on the front of his sweater.

  ‘Right, gentlemen, there’s a match to be played. Out we go.’

  He led the team down through the pavilion and out of the door on to the ground. The strong wind boomed immediately in his ears, caused an involuntary intake of breath and picked and plucked at the heavy old sweater as it tried to find a way in to freeze those old bones. His legs felt stiff, his fingertips and the palms of his hands thrummed and stung as he caught the ball they tossed between them. He hated the soft hands of a new season: with the reduced amount of cricket he was playing now it took even longer for his palms to toughen up.

  He arranged his field and as he took his customary position at point he heard a ghost of applause being whipped away in the wind as the Surrey openers Hobbs and Marshal walked to the wicket. Barely four weeks earlier Hobbs had been playing for the touring England side in 97º against Western Australia at Perth – this was something quite different. It was possibly no surprise therefore that Brearley’s third ball of the game knocked his middle stump clean out of the ground.

  Half an hour later thick flakes of snow began to blow across the field, billowing out of a featureless grey sky and giving the umpires little choice but to suspend play. The teams scuttled off to the relative warmth of the dressing-rooms where flames were roaring in the grates and, most welcomingly, under the tea urn.

  Within the hour the players were trooping back out again as a faint dusting of snow lay on the outfield. A few spectators had given up and gone home already, but as the day progressed the weather improved and there was even some sunshine in the afternoon. The bitter wind from the north-east didn’t abate, however, and for once Grace wasn’t sorry to leave the field at the end of the day, with Surrey 381 for eight.

  The following morning was brighter, but still cold. The Gentlemen wrapped up the Surrey innings for 390 within 15 minutes of the start, meaning Grace opened with Henry Keigwin in poor light with practically the entire day ahead of them. He lost his partner almost immediately for a duck but Grace dug in, defending solidly, the way he dragged the bottom of the bat along the pitch towards the ball a legacy of the terrible pitches of the sixties and seventies where shooters were rife. When rain began to fall half an hour into the innings, causing another break in play, he’d scored just four of the Gentlemen’s 21 for the loss of three wickets.

  In all he’d spend an hour and a half at the crease for 15 runs when he was clean bowled by Sydney Busher, a pace bowler who’d made his name with Barnes Cricket Club and could make the ball break off the wicket to great effect. Busher whooped with the delight of a player who had just claimed W.G. Grace as the first wicket of his first-class career.

  The Gentlemen were all out for 219 shortly after 5 p.m. when the umpires, no doubt chilled to the bone from standing still in the freezing wind all afternoon, called an end to the day’s play in gloomy light, with the Crawford brothers the only batsmen to pass 20 but contributing more than 150 – without them the total would have been utterly embarrassing.

  Surrey invited the Gentlemen to follow on the next morning and Grace again walked out to open the innings with Keigwin for his last ever knock in a first-class game. The contrasting pair, the rotund, grey-bearded old man who moved slowly and heavily between the wickets and the wiry, nimble-footed Essex youngster, proved resistant to the Surrey bowling, but even in such an apparently lost cause it was the Old Man who took the fight to the bowlers. After his stonewalling of the first innings he played his old, natural game, relishing the treatment of each delivery on its merits, blocking and cutting, pulling and driving. It may have been cold, it may have been April, there may have been barely a couple of hundred spectators in the ground and he may have been feeling the aches in his cold bones of a man in his 60th year, but he was still relishing the moment, the moment when the ball was released and age and the match and the cold and the empty enclosures didn’t matter a jot. If it was pitched up he’d drive it, if it was short he’d pull or cut and, sure enough, boundaries came.

  The Times the next day would praise his attacking shots, calling them an ‘object lesson to any young player’, but the fun was not to last. When he’d scored 25 he again lost his middle stump to a ball from Busher that broke sharply off the pitch and that was it. He strode back to the pavilion tapping the toe of his bat on the ground as he went. He stood tall, his back straight, dignified and awesome. The smattering of people in the ground applauded as loudly as they could, trying to make it sound as if they were a multitude, thinking about how they could tell their grandchildren of the day they’d seen the Champion batting at The Oval and for a while it had been like watching him in his prime, the timing, the power, the presence. And when he’d walked off, even though the famous beard may have been streaked with grey and the old MCC cap hung like a battered rag on his head, he’d left that field like a god, as if he carried the entire game of cricket with him. They’d tell of how everyone there forgot about the cold and the reduced circumstances and were instead transported back to the golden summer days of a golden age.

  In a few moments the Old Man had walked through the Gentlemen’s gate and disappeared into the pavilion and everything was dreary again.

  He was quiet as he changed, remaining in the dressing-room as the wickets fell quickly. The Gentlemen of England – such a grand name for a scratch team of journeymen cricketers whistled up by hook or by crook – were all out just before lunch for 130, losing the match heavily by an innings and 41 runs.

  The two teams took their lunch and then the players began to disperse, all brief handshakes and terse farewells spoken through pipe-clenched teeth and the echoing creaks of footsteps descending the wooden staircase until there was just the Old Man left, cricket bag packed and strapped, overcoat on and dark eyes looking out from beneath his hat.

  He sat in the dressing-room, the last man, looking at the wall opposite for a while, curiously reluctant to depart. This, he knew, was the end of his first-class career. He’d scored more than fifty thousand runs and taken nearly three thousand wickets – he still kept meticulous records at home – but those totals now would be static for ever. Those figures as they stood today, from the moment his middle stump went over that morning, would stand now for eternity.

  He stood up and walked towards the balcony. The wind tried to yank the door closed when he grasped the handle and pulled, but he was soon outside, beard teased by the gusts, sitting looking across the empty ground. The cloud had dropped into mist and The Oval was framed by a wispy halo, sepia-tinged by the smoke of a thousand chimneys, the gas holders looming in the murk.

  All was still and silent. He sat for a while watching his breath clouds whisked up to
the heavens and looked down to the empty pitch, on which barely a couple of hours earlier he’d been driving and pulling and cutting, utterly lost in the moment. There was something sad about a recently emptied cricket ground, he reflected. The beer bottles and peanut shells were pushed around beneath the benches by the wind, the echoes of the crowd had long dissipated, the sound of bat on ball risen to heaven. The empty Oval was like an old ship, dignified and noble, abandoned in a dry dock, all its adventures and stories and personalities soaked into the rivets, the plating, the carved oak interiors. He could see the scars on the wicket from the match just completed and in his mind’s eye he saw that ball from Busher, breaking off the pitch past the shoulder of his bat as he dragged it forward, and hitting middle stump. The dreaded click of ball striking stump and the hollow woody thump of stump striking ground echoed inside his head. He wasn’t replaying it for the purposes of revising technique, he wasn’t wondering what he could have done differently – nothing, was the answer, he’d have played exactly the same shot – but it was the appreciation that that ball was the last he’d ever face in first-class cricket.

  He closed his eyes and it was as if the years opened beneath him to fall back to a sunny July day in 1880. He’d made 152 in the first innings of his first Test against the Australians, racing to 91 for the first wicket with E.M., but it wasn’t his own achievements that had come into his mind, it was what happened the following day. Fred Morley had got well among the Australian order and when big George Bonnor came in at seven with those mighty forearms they were 80-odd for five in reply to 420. Lord Harris threw the ball to Alfred Shaw at the Vauxhall End because it was clear Bonnor was looking to make some big hits and Shaw was wily enough to coax him into a mistake. Sure enough, within a few balls he caught hold of a ball from Shaw that dipped slightly at the last moment and sent it steepling into the air towards the cover boundary. From point the Old Man had a perfect view of its enormous parabola; so high did it climb that the batsmen were able to complete two runs. If it hadn’t been for that late dip of Shaw’s, thought Grace, the ball could have ended up on the roof of Waterloo railway station. He looked down from the ball to see, racing around the boundary, eyes not leaving the ball, setting himself beneath it, dear brother Fred. Grace watched as that handsomely youthful face upturned, eyes on the ball and, smack, the ball dropped into his hands with minimal fuss and was clutched to his chest. Fred was the finest fielder of all the Graces but that catch was outstanding even for him. W.G. had roared his approval along with the crowd. The memory of the childlike delight in Fred’s eyes, that same sparkle that Bessie always had in hers, was as fresh in his mind as yesterday even though nearly 30 years had passed since. With the crowd’s cheers and hurrahs, the congratulations of his team-mates washing over him, he’d never seen Fred so happy, so vibrant, so thrumming with life.

  Yet within two weeks they were burying him. A few days after the Test he’d caught a cold but none the less travelled from Bristol to Stroud to play for the United South. He made runs, too, but a couple of soakings during the game only made his cold worse. From Stroud he’d set off for Winchester where he was due to play his next match, a benefit, one he really didn’t want to miss. Staying at a hotel in Basingstoke en route, his symptoms worsened to pneumonia and he was confined to his bed there. He rallied, declined, rallied and declined until finally he died peacefully at lunchtime on the afternoon of 22 September. W.G. and his father had received the news at the little railway station at Bradford-on-Avon while waiting for a train to take them to see him.

  He’d always blamed himself for not being there. Dr Charles Frere Webb was an old family friend who lived in the town and had attended to Fred for the whole week. Their cousin Walter Gilbert had travelled up, too, and the prognoses arriving from them both suggested that there was no call for despair. Neither of them would have concealed the gravity of the situation and his terminal decline was sudden and shattering, yet, having received the terrible news in the afternoon shade of a sleepy rural railway station, he still felt he should have gone to Basingstoke and attended to his brother when he was first taken ill. It was 28 years ago now – Fred had been 29 so had now been dead almost as long as he’d been alive – but the memories of that catch, his face and his eyes, and the terrible vision of the station master at Bradford-on-Avon rushing up to them on the platform, the expression on his face almost obviating the need to read the telegram, were as fresh as yesterday. He could even remember the jingle of the man’s keys as he ran along the platform calling out to them and waving the telegram as they prepared to board the train.

  He looked out across the field to where Fred had taken that extraordinary catch. The contrast between that joyous, sun-blessed moment in front of a Test match crowd and the bare, soulless, sleet-strafed view in front of him couldn’t have been more marked; couldn’t have illustrated better that thin line between joyous life and pitiless death.

  The thought of a life without a cricket match to look forward to made him shudder, so it was a thought he tended to banish whenever it arose. But how much longer could he go on? He’d proved in this sad husk of a game that he could still play his shots all around the wicket against first-class bowlers despite his advancing years and increasing aches and pains. The desire was still there, the childlike enthusiasm, the longing for the moment when nothing else mattered and there was nothing else in the world. He couldn’t imagine a life without that. Couldn’t countenance it. That, he thought, truly would be hell.

  Would he ever walk out at The Oval again? Was this game, this dreadful game in the cold and the snow in front of a handful of spectators, to be his swansong here? After all the great occasions? The triumphs and the disappointments? That epic Test of 1882 when the Australians came here and won in one of the most thrilling final days he could remember? That dramatic, tension-filled final day when England, needing only 85 to win, were bowled out for 77, Spofforth running through the order with speed, guile and fearsome determination?

  They say Spofforth was fired up that day after he, Grace, had run out Jones the previous day. Certainly when Grace walked to the wicket to bat on the final day Bonnor and Garrett had made it disgracefully plain that they felt he had acted improperly. Yet W.G. felt entirely vindicated in running out Jones. The man had completed a run, Grace had the ball in his hand and the batsman had left the crease to pat down a divot. The ball, as far as he was concerned and, importantly, as far as the umpires and therefore the laws of the game were concerned, was live so there was no question Grace wouldn’t knock off a bail and make an entirely justifiable appeal.

  The innings he played that last day, among all the tension, the histrionics of the Australians, the extraordinarily good bowling of Spofforth, the enormous crowd sharing the unbearable tension – he’d heard that as the game edged towards a conclusion one man bit clean through the wooden handle of his umbrella and another dropped down dead from the anxiety – was one of his finest, despite it being in vain and the Australians claiming their first ever Test victory in this country. He’d guided them to 51 for three before he hit Boyle to mid-off and was caught for 35, easily the top score in what turned out to be a losing cause. Of course he hated losing, especially to the Australians and especially after the insults of Bonnor and Garrett, but that innings was one of the most satisfactorily defiant of his life. He looked out at the field and could see Spofforth running in from the Vauxhall End, one of the hundreds of ghosts of players he’d battled with and against out there over the years.

  There were footsteps on the stairs, the jingle of a set of keys and the creak of the dressing-room door opening behind him. A head poked out of the balcony door.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Doctor, I didn’t think there was anyone still here,’ said George, the caretaker. ‘I was about to lock up.’

  ‘It’s all right, George,’ he replied. ‘I was just going.’

  He heaved himself to his feet.

  ‘A rum time of year for a game of cricket, Doctor,’ said George. ‘It was pe
rishing. You must have been feeling it in your bones.’

  ‘I was indeed, George,’ he replied. ‘Feeling it in my bones.’

  Saturday 24 April 1909

  Curiosity. That’s mainly what had compelled him to attend the 1909 Football Association Cup Final at the Crystal Palace. That and the fact his old local team Bristol City had reached the final for the first time in its history. The same was true of their opponents, Manchester United from the North-West. As the final was being played practically on his Sydenham doorstep, meaning he could be back home in front of the fire with a whisky and soda within 20 minutes of the final whistle, he was delighted to accept an invitation to attend as an honoured guest.

  Grace may have been a cricket man, but he appreciated all sports. He still went out beagling with the Worcester Park hounds whenever he could and still thoroughly enjoyed crown green bowls, a more genteel version of the West Country skittles of his childhood. Indeed it was a sport at which he excelled to the extent of captaining England in its first bowls international in 1903, winning the first home international tournament (even if he did have to point out the quirk of the rules that gave the title to England rather than the much-fancied Scots and insist it was upheld). He liked nothing more than sending his wood thundering down the green to scatter his opponents’ far and wide, in spite of the frequent whispers about the tactical value of his unsubtle philosophy. The number of Scots in his ‘England’ team was also a subject of discussion, out of his earshot.