by Low, Robert
He undertook further studies at the combined medical school of Guy’s and St Thomas’s Hospitals in London and on qualifying embarked on the life of a country doctor which he was to be for the rest of his life. Henry was twenty-three when he married Martha Pocock in 1831. Born on 18 July 1812, she was barely nineteen on her wedding day but was a perfect match for the energetic, hard-working young doctor.
She was a spirited girl from a decidedly eccentric background. Her father, George Pocock, was proprietor of a private boarding school at St Michael’s Hill, Bristol, and as fervent about religion as Henry Grace was about cricket. So keen was he to spread the word that he toured the West Country in a horse-drawn trap, erecting a tent which he called his ‘itinerant temple’ in places where there was no church but a likely supply of worshippers.
He was also obsessed with box-kites. Family legend had it that he and his daughters once drove from Bristol to London in a carriage drawn by a kite, overtaking the Duke of York’s more conventionally-powered coach on the way. That may have been the same journey as one he reportedly made in 1828 to the Ascot races where his kite-carriage was said to have greatly impressed George IV. Pocock was also said to have designed a kite-borne chair, which sounds like an early prototype of a hang-glider, in which young Martha was once strapped and transported across the Avon Gorge.
Martha grew to be a most remarkable woman, and more than a century after her death remains possibly the most influential in the history of cricket. Even today cricket is overwhelmingly a male-dominated sport, and women who are both passionate and knowledgeable about the game are regarded as something of an oddity by many men. However, the informed cricket woman is to be seen, instantly recognisable, at Lord’s or any county ground, as much a part of the scenery as the players, umpires or scorers. Martha Grace was the archetype, and has yet to be improved upon. The great cricketer Richard Daft said of her, ‘She knew ten times more about cricket than any lady I ever met.’
She was an imposing figure, ‘of magnificent physique and indomitable will’, and W.G. strongly resembled her physically. Quite where her love of cricket sprang from is uncertain; perhaps from her brother Alfred (‘Uncle Pocock’) who was also a key figure in the Grace boys’ cricket education. At any rate Martha took as much a part in the coaching of her sons as her husband and closely followed her talented sons’ progress. She watched them play whenever she could and was forthright in her criticisms. In her old age she regularly attended Gloucestershire’s matches and was noted for her pithy comments on the play and the players. Indeed it appears to have been part of a Gloucestershire’s batsman’s duties, once dismissed, to pay his respects to Mrs Grace as she sat in the stand and to listen attentively as he was told just where he had gone wrong. For some reason she disliked left-handed batsmen and fielders who returned the ball underarm (which would presumably have doubly disqualified David Gower from her pantheon).
Throughout her life she demanded to be kept informed of her sons’ performances: when they were playing away from home, they would post to her the day’s scoresheets or send her a telegram informing her of their achievements that day, which would arrive the same evening. She cut out all newspaper reports of their doings and pasted them in large scrapbooks. She was their greatest supporter, and author of the most famous letter in English cricket. This was to George Parr, captain of the All England XI in which she recommended her third son, Edward Mills Grace, for selection in the England team, and added that she had a younger son who would eventually be even better because his back-play was sounder and he always played with a straight bat.
There is a touching vignette of the old lady watching the Lansdown Club in 1884 playing the American tourists, Gentlemen of Philadelphia, and being offered a chair by a player who did not recognise her. As they talked of the game, she said, ‘I taught my sons to play. I used to bowl to them.’
Henry Grace and his bride settled in the Gloucestershire village of Downend, four miles outside the bustling city of Bristol, and never moved from it thereafter. Grace was a highly conscientious doctor and a good surgeon, whose practice extended for a twelve-mile radius around Downend. He covered it on horseback and was often not back home until midnight. He was surgeon to the Royal Gloucestershire Reserves and did much work for the underprivileged as medical officer to the Poor Law. A jovial and popular man, he ranged easily over the classes. He was a friend of the Duke of Beaufort and a frequent visitor to Badminton to hunt during the winter.
His obituary in the Lancet noted: ‘Few better horsemen ever rode to cover.’ He was also a man of strong views and principles. W.G. wrote of him: ‘He took great care that the foxes were preserved and was so strict that he used to say that a man who would kill a fox would commit almost any crime.’ He seems to have been decidedly progressive in many ways. He never smoked, and drank but little, ‘a glass of wine with his dinner and a little whisky and water at night’, reported W.G., also a lifelong non-smoker – apart perhaps from the occasional cigar – but liked a glass of whisky at lunchtime during a cricket match and enjoyed champagne too.
The Graces’ first home was Downend House, on whose lawn the doctor lost no time in laying down a cricket pitch in front of the house where he could practise. However, having his own pitch was never going to be enough for the cricket-mad doctor. Interest in the game was growing to such an extent in Downend and the surrounding villages, as elsewhere in the country, that Dr Grace and his friends decided to set up their own club. They found some common land at Rodway Hill at Mangotsfield, about a mile to the east of Downend, and cleared, levelled and fenced in some forty square yards of it to create their own ground.
Thus was born the Mangotsfield Cricket Club, with Dr Grace and Arthur Pocock its two leading lights. Pocock, a good racquets player, was a novice at cricket but took to it with a will and was soon an accomplished all-rounder. He was a great one for practice, a habit he was to pass on to his nephews. The club prospered, aided by two of Mrs Grace’s nephews, William Rees and George Gilbert, who came to stay at Downend House during the summer holidays for several years and showed themselves a cut above the average local player. At around the same time, the West Gloucestershire club had been founded at Coalpit Heath, a couple of miles north of Downend, by another local enthusiast, Henry Hewitt. The two clubs became fierce rivals, with West Gloucestershire at first holding the advantage. Mangotsfield, however, gradually overhauled their rivals and in 1847 the clubs agreed to pool their resources. The new club went under the name of West Gloucestershire but was based at Rodway Hill, where it played for twenty more years. West Gloucestershire became the dominant club of the area; the only other team to pose a regular challenge was Lansdown.
Henry and Martha Grace lived at Downend House for nineteen years, during which time Martha gave birth to eight of their nine children, five sons and four daughters. The four boys born there were Henry, the eldest, (31 January 1833), Alfred (17 May 1840), Edward Mills (28 November 1841) and William Gilbert, who arrived on 18 July 1848, his mother’s thirty-sixth birthday. The girls were Annie, born in 1834, Fanny Hellings (1838), Alice Rose (1845) and the youngest, Elizabeth Blanche, who like W.G. was known by her second name, and was born in 1847. By 1850, with their last child on the way, the Graces needed a bigger house and moved across the road to The Chestnuts, where George Frederick (‘Fred’) was born on 13 December 1850 to complete the family.
Downend is no longer a self-contained village but part of the straggling suburbs of Bristol. Downend House still stands there, although its ground floor has been extensively remodelled and in 1996 was home to offices of a lift firm and a catering company. It bears a small plaque which states that ‘Dr W.G. Grace, Famous Gloucester Cricketer, was born here on the 18th July, 1848’. Another plaque proclaims it to be part of the Kingswood Heritage Trail.
The Chestnuts (or The Chesnuts as the Graces eccentrically spelt it) was much more suitable for the large and lively family than the relatively cramped conditions of Downend House. It was, according to a c
ontemporary description, ‘a square, plain building … ivy creeping all over, with pretty flower garden, and numerous outhouses … Walking up the carriage drive, past the lodge and old summer house, you come to the main entrance … beyond, the orchard, some 80 yards in length, high wall on the left.’ Still farther beyond was a view of barley and oat fields stretching away to the villages of Frenchay and Stapleton in the far distance.
Alas, the house no longer exists. On its site stands a spectacularly hideous British Telecom building, dating from 1968, and adorned with an antenna tower for mobile telephones. Next to it is a 1980s shopping parade, decorated with a portrait of W.G. Behind the buildings, there is a field divided into allotments, which must be the garden of The Chestnuts. It still presents an attractively rural aspect.
The apple trees in one of the orchards – for there were, in fact, two – stood in the way of Dr Grace’s ideal: his own cricket pitch. With Arthur Pocock and eldest son Henry, by now a strapping teenager, he set to and felled most of them. Edward Mills (later better known, like W.G., by his initials E.M.) took over the job with relish as he grew older, making the cricket field bigger and better – he was always a keen organiser, as he showed when he ran Gloucestershire C.C.’s affairs for nearly forty years. A piece of canvas, hung on three poles like a beach windbreak, was put up behind the batsman’s end to do the job of wicketkeeper and the stage was set. Here the Grace family practised with a dedication bordering on the obsessional, in the early morning or late in the evening, co-opting anybody and everybody to help: maids, the bootboy, but only very occasionally one of the Grace sisters, despite a legend that grew up when W.G. was young that the girls fielded with enthusiasm while the boys batted. One young Downend man called Alf Monks was regularly invited to bowl. As an incentive, the Grace boys put two-shilling coins or half-crowns on the stumps and told Alf he could keep any that he knocked off. Although he rarely succeeded, he was usually compensated with five shillings for his efforts, so he rarely lost out.
What a fortunate childhood! ‘It was as natural for me and everyone at home to walk out to the ground as it is for every boy in England to go into his nursery,’ W.G. mused later. ‘And what boy with a choice at his command would prefer the latter?’
The most remarkable participants in the family practice sessions were the Graces’ dogs, Don and Ponto, the two pointers, and Noble, the retriever, and by all accounts the best cricketer of the three. Family legend had it that the dogs were connoisseurs of the game. They were said to position themselves behind the bowler and if the ball was pitched on the off side they would make off in that direction even before the batsman had hit it. If he pulled it from outside off stump to leg they would decline to run after it. One suspects the notorious leg-pulling of the whole Grace clan behind this story.
W.G. – ‘Young Gilbert’ – had the best of all worlds as a boy. His older brothers were still around for practice and his father and Uncle Pocock still in the prime of life and eager to coach him. Gilbert was fielding for them all from the moment he could run around, and he soon picked up a bat too. Uncle Pocock took a special interest in coaching him and was to be a big influence on the boy. W.G. was always at great pains to emphasise that his uncle insisted he played with a straight bat from the first. Perhaps this was out of guilt that he and Dr Grace had allowed E.M. to develop bad habits through not having the correct-sized bat. Uncle Pocock worked on W.G.’s stance and his footwork and for years insisted that he do no more than defend his wicket. ‘There must be no playing or hitting wildly,’ was the instruction and Gilbert applied himself with total dedication. He claimed he was not a ‘natural’ player to whom the art of batting came easily; but his uncle had obviously spotted something in the boy. He insisted he learn to bat the right way: left shoulder forward, head over the ball, and watch the ball all the way. Gilbert applied himself diligently. Indeed he himself thought that what marked him out from E.M. and Fred was his perseverance, a quality he possessed in abundance. ‘I had to work as hard at learning cricket as ever I worked at my profession or anything else,’ he wrote later.
When there were no adults around, Gilbert co-opted a stable-boy and some boys from the village, chalking a wicket on the wall in the fashion of boys throughout the ages. Sometimes he would play with a broom-handle instead of a bat. It is interesting to note that some of the finest batsmen in cricket history have devised similar practice routines as small boys, when there was no one else to play with. The very best shared a devotion bordering on the obsessional. As a solitary boy in the outback, Don Bradman practised with a stump and a ball he would throw up and hit, and the greatest batsman of modern times, Brian Lara, did much the same as a child in Trinidad, throwing marbles against a wall and using a broom-handle or ruler to deal with the rebounds. (If he missed, he declared himself out.) It would be difficult to devise a better home-made way of honing hand-eye co-ordination. In Gilbert’s case his reflexes were further sharpened by the high number of underarm ‘shooters’ bowled at him by the village boys.
At the age of about six, he was given his first bat, his father and uncle being determined to avoid the mistake they had made with E.M. However, in the family practices opportunities to use it were limited. The older ones had seniority: they had fifteen minutes batting at a time, the little ones, Gilbert and Fred, only five. When not batting the youngsters fielded, trying to keep E.M.’s booming on-drives from going into the woods or the neighbouring quarry beyond long-on. The hours of practice must not only have sharpened the skills of boys who would eventually be among the country’s finest fielders; they also contributed to W.G.’s extraordinary stamina.
Cricket was by no means the only interest to occupy Gilbert’s time. He enjoyed all the usual diversions of a country boy, roaming the woods and fields and educating himself in the ways of nature. He was particularly keen on collecting birds’ eggs and snakes, the latter of which he would smuggle into the house to the consternation of his sisters.
He first went to the village school, run by a Miss Trotman, and was then entrusted to a private tutor, Mr Curtis, at Winterbourne, a couple of miles away. Nowadays he would have to cross the M4 to do it; he probably walked there and back. That was nothing in those days: Uncle Pocock routinely walked twelve miles to Downend just for cricket practice. Alfred and Edward had been sent away to boarding school and after Mr Curtis’s tuition young Gilbert went to a local boarding school, Rudgway House, run by a Mr Malpas, until he was fourteen.
One of W.G.’s contemporary biographers, W. Methven Brownlee, describes him at Rudgway House as ‘a steady working lad, accurate at mathematics, with no mischief in him’. The Memorial Biography of Dr W.G. Grace, published in 1919, summarises his educational achievements succinctly: ‘Of his school days the traditions are those of happy activity not of bookish application; invariably he bore an excellent character.’ His greatest achievement was to be marbles champion, ‘on one occasion clearing out the school’, according to Brownlee, with the covert assistance of one of the masters, Mr Bernard, who had taken a shine to Gilbert’s sister Alice and had clearly enlisted the boy to aid his cause. Gilbert may have been of some help, for Mr Bernard eventually married Alice and quit teaching to become a doctor, like his brothers-in-law.
The Grace girls threw themselves into family and community activities with the same vigour as their brothers. E.C. Biggs, the postmaster’s son, remembered one of them – probably Blanche – helping out when he mentioned that they needed curtains for the back of the stage at the annual concert to raise money for Downend Cricket Club. She used to play the harp or get guest artists to play at the event, and on this occasion she offered the Graces’ own drawing-room curtains, with words that might have come from any Grace, male or female: ‘Anything to help the good old game.’
The Grace boys hunted in a pack. The smaller orchard at The Chestnuts was a magnet for local kids, who would throw stones at the trees, then dash inside and pick up any apples they had dislodged. Woe betide them if the Grace boys caught them at
it. One scrumper related how the Graces ‘came after us with carriage whips’. One local’s pockets were so stuffed with apples that they prevented him from crawling under the gate to make his getaway. ‘He received a nice cut or two with the whip before he could manage to shake off his coat and run.’ But the Graces did not bear a grudge: the boy got his coat back as soon as he returned to apologise.
The Graces’ home was a magnet for the village kids in the autumn too, when they would search for the sweet chestnuts that gave the house its name. They did so one Sunday, forgetting that the Graces would all be at home. Spotting the intruders, the brothers came charging down the drive, young Fred leading the way. He picked up a rock-hard pear and hurled it so accurately that it knocked one of the boys out cold. W.G. arrived, picked up the unconscious child and carried him indoors. The others hovered anxiously at the gate until Fred’s victim emerged with a broad smile and a shilling given him by W.G.
The Grace brothers were in large measure chips off the old block. All qualified as doctors except for Fred, the youngest, who was only denied the title by his untimely death as he neared the end of his medical studies. ‘They were all, more or less, crack shots, fast runners, devoted to the chase, and have long distinguished themselves in many a pedestrian contest, for all of which they have long been celebrated in the “amateur county”,’ reported Haygarth’s Cricket Scores & Biographies. Moreover, they emulated their father in their energy, enthusiasm and enjoyment of life, and they were devoted to each other and to the family. E.C. Biggs, son of the Downend postmaster, painted this evocative portrait of them in a letter to the Bristol Evening World: