WG Grace

by Low, Robert

  Not only did he quit Gloucestershire County Cricket Club, he left the county of his birth, and the practice of medicine, for ever and moved to London. The abruptness of his departure is intriguing. Did he ever really enjoy being a doctor? Did he perhaps go into medicine out of a sense of family duty? His father and three older brothers were doctors and it seems to have been considered inevitable that W.G. would follow suit. Whether he was ever consulted about it is another matter.

  His medical studies took him the best part of a decade to complete, which is hardly surprising given that at the same time he was in his prime as a cricketer and made two overseas tours. But even so it does not speak of great aptitude for the work. He practised medicine in Bristol for nearly two decades, mainly in the winter, for he continued to play cricket during the summers with undiminished enthusiasm, and was greatly loved by his patients. But at the age of fifty-one he gave it up at short notice and never went back to it.

  This was premature by any standards. His father and brothers, for example, practised medicine almost until their dying days. In various memoirs, W.G. never wrote a word about his medical work and does not seem to have missed it at all, particularly once his financial future was secure, thanks to his second testimonial. Perhaps he went along with the study of medicine in the 1870s out of respect for the memory of his father, Dr Henry Grace, who died in 1871, and felt free to abandon a doctor’s labours after the death of his eldest brother, Henry junior, in 1895.

  He was not a complicated man. Like most of the Grace brothers, he adored practical jokes and schoolboy japes, even in his fifties. His idea of a lark was to suggest to his fellow-players staying at the Grand Hotel, Bournemouth, to race up the stairs to the top of the hotel and back, the last man to stand drinks all round – and this at one o’clock in the morning. He took part, naturally, and did not have to pay for the round. Then they did it all over again, to the consternation of the other guests, who by now thought the hotel must be on fire. As several of his contemporaries noted, he was really just an overgrown schoolboy. Indeed, he was never happier than in the company of children. One of his granddaughters remembered sitting on his knee and tying ribbons in his beard, to his huge amusement.

  He left Bristol for ever in 1899 but there were many in the city nearly half a century later in the 1930s who could still remember Dr Grace on his rounds putting down his bag and joining in a snowball fight with the local boys, or an impromptu game of cricket. He would round up a few youths to bowl at him in his garden or before an innings on the county ground, always tipping them generously. For while he was notorious for demanding and getting what he thought he was worth as a cricketer he was equally free in dispensing his money to anyone, young or old, who did him a favour. When a youth found his purse in the street and took it to his surgery, W.G. gave him the purse and all the money in it, which was enough to buy the lad a new suit.

  He seems to have spent his life in perpetual motion. When he wasn’t playing cricket or attending to his patients, he was out following the beagles or, in later life, playing golf or bowls. He adored beagling, a recreation he pursued all his life (he had to give up riding to hounds when he got too heavy for a horse). His stamina was remarkable and so was his strength, as one Gloucestershire farmer discovered when he tried to block W.G. from pursuing the beagles into his fields. W.G. simply picked up the man, tucked him under his arm and strode across his land, depositing him on the other side with a threat to smack his bottom if he misbehaved himself further. When another farmer rejoiced at the sight of W.G. falling headlong into a ditch as he raced after the dogs, W.G. got up, grabbed him and sat him down in the water too. ‘He picked me up as if I’d been a new-born baby,’ the farmer is said to have remarked wonderingly when told the identity of his huge assailant.

  Such stories are all part of the Grace legend, and there are a thousand such anecdotes about his cricketing life which have gone into the game’s folklore. Many of them involve Tom Emmett, the doughty Yorkshire left-arm seam bowler who was involved in many a long battle with W.G. ‘He ought to have a littler bat,’ was his comment during one epic innings. Another left-armer who came in for a lot of punishment from W.G. was Nottinghamshire’s James Shaw, who made the immortal remark: ‘I puts ’em where I likes, and he puts ’em where he likes.’

  The commonest perception of W.G., which persists to this day, is that he was a cheat, that he bent the rules to suit himself, and would simply ignore an umpire’s decision if he did not agree with it. ‘He would stretch the laws of cricket uncommonly taut in his own favour,’ wrote Lord Hawke, ‘but nobody bore him a grudge.’ Whether W.G. behaved very differently from anybody else playing then or now is a moot point. I was writing some of this book to the accompaniment of the radio commentary on the climax of the first Test between Zimbabwe and England in December 1996, when Zimbabwe deliberately bowled wide to prevent the England batsmen from scoring the last few vital runs. I have no doubt that had W.G. been captaining the fielding side in such a situation he would have ordered his bowlers to behave in a similar fashion.

  He played to win, although he could accept defeat gracefully. He undoubtedly tried to intimidate umpires into giving marginal decisions in his favour but, again as I write, the England team in Zimbabwe has just been warned by the match referee for that very offence. When Gloucestershire played Essex at Leyton in 1898, W.G. infuriated the Essex fielders as the game built up towards a tight finish by refusing to accept the umpire’s initial verdict of ‘out’ for what he thought was a bump-ball return catch. On that occasion, the umpire backed down, but just as frequently umpires did not, sending W.G. on his way despite his grumbles. Once he enquired, as he left the wicket, which leg the umpire thought the ball had struck for an lbw decision. ‘Never mind which leg,’ replied the umpire. ‘I’ve given you out and out you’ve got to go.’

  To another umpire who had also given him out leg before, W.G. complained, ‘I played that ball.’

  ‘Yes,’ retorted the umpire, ‘but it was after it had hit your leg.’

  In these days the sports pages are full of batsmen who never touched the ball but were given out caught behind, or off bat and pad at forward-short-leg, and often we are none the wiser after watching the television replay half-a-dozen times.

  So, while W.G. may frequently have stretched the laws as far as he could, the idea that he invariably disregarded the umpire’s verdict if he did not agree with it is an exaggeration. He once prevented a Gloucestershire batsman from leaving the pavilion to go out to the wicket at Bristol because he believed the last man out, Gilbert Jessop, had not been fairly caught on the boundary. The game was held up for half an hour while the argument raged but the umpires had their way in the end.

  W.G. was essentially a cricketer who liked to win and occasionally crossed the barrier between fair and foul play in tight situations, like many others before and since. He was involved in a number of notorious incidents in first-class cricket, such as when he ran out the Australian batsman Sammy Jones in the legendary match at The Oval in 1882 when Jones wandered up the pitch to do a spot of ‘gardening’. Most people – including the batsman – thought the ball was dead but the umpire bowed to W.G.’s appeal.

  Tony Greig did something very similar to Alvin Kallicharran in 1974, and the umpire agreed with him too. Such was the outcry that the appeal was withdrawn and the West Indian reinstated, but when people think of Greig today they don’t think of him primarily as a cheat but as occasionally over-enthusiastic for the best motives. (Incidentally, had Kerry Packer existed in W.G.’s day, he would have been strongly tempted to throw in his lot with Packer, as Greig did, for W.G. was always keen on money. He would have made a great limited-overs player too.)

  Like players today, he behaved worse than normally if he thought the standard of umpiring was low, as it probably was on his two tours of Australia where he repeatedly took umbrage at the umpires’ decisions, and thereby earned the hostility of press and public, though interestingly not of the Australian p
layers. They knew a tough competitor when they saw one, and probably didn’t think much of their own officials either.

  Nothing W.G. got up to in Australia was anything like as bad as the row between the England captain Mike Gatting and the local umpire Shakoor Rana in Pakistan in 1987 which helped to sour cricketing relations between the two countries for years.

  Many of the stories about W.G. and umpires stem from club matches where nothing was at stake and where the crowd undoubtedly wanted to see the legendary figure in action. He went out to open the innings in a charity match, attended by a large and expectant crowd, only to see the second ball remove the off bail. W.G. bent down, picked it up and replaced it, saying to the wicketkeeper in his inimitable Gloucestershire accent, ‘Strong wind today, Jarge.’ No one queried his action and he went on to hit 142 – which is what everyone had hoped to see.

  His contemporaries had no doubt about his stature. Those two cricketing peers who dominated the councils of the Victorian game, Lords Hawke and Harris, produced very similar verdicts on him. ‘As a cricketer,’ wrote Hawke,

  I do not hesitate to say that not only was he the greatest that ever lived, but also the greatest that ever can be, because no future batsman will ever have to play on the bad wickets on which he made his mark and proved himself so immeasurably superior to all his contemporaries.

  According to Harris,

  he was … always a most genial, even-tempered, considerate companion and of all the many cricketers I have ever known the kindest as well as the best. He was ever ready with an encouraging word for the novice, and a compassionate one for the man who had made a mistake … It is difficult to believe that a combination so remarkable of health, activity, power, eye, hand, devotion and opportunity will ever present itself again.

  There is much more anecdotal evidence about his kindness to young players and modesty about his own achievements.

  If he had a weakness, it was as a captain. While he was a dab hand at enticing a batsman out with a crafty bit of field placing, he had a tendency to let things drift along when imagination and daring were called for. He was no innovator, but an instinctive conservative, and he brooked no opposition to his way of doing things. His record was patchy. He led Gloucestershire with great success in the first years of the county’s official existence but that was due more to his own overwhelming dominance with bat and ball, ably backed up by his brothers E.M. and G.F. The county’s fortunes declined and W.G. failed to bring on enough new players to restore it to its previous eminence.

  But of his own playing ability there will never be any doubt. In our century, Gary Sobers was a purer all-rounder and Don Bradman a greater run-getter, although there are some interesting parallels between Bradman and Grace. Both were country boys who displayed a fierce dedication from a very young age, while their adult play was characterised by enormous patience and discipline. Neither was a stylist; instead, they were brutally effective, deriving an almost sadistic pleasure from reducing a bowling attack to rubble. Bradman’s career batting figures (first-class average: 95.14, Test average 99.94) were far superior to Grace’s but he played on much better pitches. Perhaps the greatest similarity between them was that they represented more than cricket to the common man in his own country. Bradman was the personification of an Australia emerging from the dominance of its colonial master, Grace the hero to the working class of industrial Victorian England.

  W.G.’s abiding legacy, however, is that no single cricketer has since dominated the game so totally as he did for more than thirty years. English cricket these days could do with someone possessing one tenth of his talent, discipline and will to win.

  2 · THE GRACE FAMILY

  THE year is 1858, the scene the garden of a large house in the village of Downend, near Bristol. The big lawn is shaded by several spreading chestnut trees. It is an early summer’s day, clear and bright, a light breeze chases a few clouds quickly across the blue sky. In the garden, a stocky teenage boy in shirt-sleeves is driving three cricket stumps into the grass at the end of the lawn nearest the house. A strip of grass has been mown shorter than the rest to make a pitch. A single stump has already been set up some twenty yards away.

  Another young man, sporting a dark moustache, is rolling up his shirt-sleeves. Two older men, well into middle age, talk with each other as they take off their jackets and lay them on the grass. A little boy of seven capers around the lawn and begs to be allowed to play with the grown-ups. A peal of laughter comes from the edge of the lawn under a large chestnut tree where stand a middle-aged lady and her daughters – two young women and two much younger girls in their early teens, in blouses and demure ankle-length skirts. Occasionally they bend to stroke two dogs lying at their feet, a golden retriever and a pointer. Another pointer crouches near by, wagging its tail and watching the activity on the lawn intently as if waiting for an invitation to join in.

  There is one other person on the lawn: a boy about ten years old, kneeling as he straps a pad on to his leg. That done, he picks up a bat from the grass beside him, stands up and walks to a position just in front of the stumps. He is a slim, slight figure compared to the adults, with jet-black hair and intense dark eyes that stand out against his pale face. He has an air of seriousness, watchfulness and concentration.

  The middle-aged men and the smallest boy stroll to positions around the lawn. The young man with the moustache walks up the wicket, exchanges a word with the dark-haired boy and proceeds to crouch behind the stumps. The teenager picks up a cricket ball, waits for the dark-haired boy to take guard, then runs a few paces to the single stump and delivers the ball with a round-arm slinging action. The boy picks his bat up cleanly, plants his padded left leg down the wicket and strikes the ball on the off side towards the young women chatting under the chestnut. As it speeds towards them, bouncing off the uneven surface of the lawn, the black dog at their feet snaps out of his crouch and leaps at the ball as it breasts him, knocks it down with his chest and pounces on it. At this, the girls laugh and clap and the men cheer. ‘Well stopped, Ponto sir!’ shouts one, as the dog picks the ball up in his mouth and trots towards the bowler, his tail wagging furiously. Turning towards the batsman, one of the older men says quietly, ‘And well hit, Gilbert.’ The older woman, who has been watching the episode closely, nods approvingly.

  Lost in a world of his own, the dark-haired boy does not appear to have noticed the dog’s antics, nor heard the word of praise from his father. William Gilbert Grace rehearses the off-drive again, then resumes his guard, waiting for the next delivery.

  As we near the end of the twentieth century there is much discussion and soul-searching in many British sports about how to spot, train and develop children with sporting talent. In tennis and cricket particularly, games invented in Britain and which used to spawn a steady stream of great players, there seems a dreadful dearth of potential world-beaters. If by chance a good cricketer is unearthed, there is reluctance to blood him in the demanding arena of Test cricket. Yet in other countries bright youngsters are pitched into international matches while still in their teens. In Australia the country’s most promising young players are invited to attend the National Cricket Academy of excellence in Adelaide and submitted to a demanding year-long training programme to prepare them for greater things, with notable success. After England had lost several successive Ashes series in the 1980s and 1990s by embarrassing margins, the cry went up: Why can’t we do the same?

  Perhaps these things don’t have to be done by governments or governing bodies. A century and a half ago, William Gilbert Grace was born into a home-grown sporting academy, whose record would stand comparison with any official institution charged with turning out good sportsmen. His father and favourite uncle were keen cricketers, his four brothers all fine players. Of the five Grace boys, three became among the best cricketers in England, and Gilbert the greatest the game had ever seen. Even their mother was, untypically for the Victorian age, an enthusiast who was highly knowledgeable about the gam
e and followed her sons’ progress keenly.

  Their father, Henry Mills Grace, was born on 21 February 1808, in the Somerset village of Long Ashton. His own father, also called Henry, was said to have been an Irish footman at Long Ashton Court who married the daughter of the chief steward. It is attractive to think of the Grace boys having Irish blood. Certainly, they displayed all the classic Irish traits of athleticism, physical courage, wit and good-natured cheek. Henry Mills Grace’s was a typical rural childhood of the age: he grew up well versed in the traditional country pursuits, particularly riding, but he also acquired an early interest in cricket and, as a boy, played the game as much as he could. His distinguished son later described with sympathy the problems young Henry had in practising the game as much as he clearly would have liked. ‘If he had had the opportunities afforded to his children he would have attained a good position as an all-round player,’ wrote W.G. in 1891. ‘Clubs were few in number in his boyhood and grounds were fewer still.’

  Sport was not yet the integral part of the school curriculum that it was to become in the mid-Victorian era so Henry’s cricketing development was restricted. Like many a father before and since, he was determined his own sons should not suffer the same lack of facilities, which helps to explain the intense devotion he was later to lavish on their sporting education, with such remarkable results. A sturdy 5 ft 10 in tall, weighing 13 stone, Henry Grace was not a man to be put off by anything.

  Settling on a career in medicine, he was articled to a surgeon in Bristol, after the custom of the times, but did not allow his studies to interfere with his cricket. Two or three times a week he and some friends would rise early in the morning to head for Durdham Down, a large expanse of open common ground to the north-west of the city, where Gloucestershire were to play their first county match against Surrey many years later in 1870 with Henry Grace’s sons among the participants. On Durdham Down, Henry and company would practise their cricket between five and eight o’clock, Henry batting right-handed but bowling and throwing in left-handed.