WG Grace

by Low, Robert

  By then, Clarke, ever on the look-out for a good business opportunity, had set up his All England Eleven. As he had predicted, it was a huge success. Invitations came in from all over the country and Clarke’s circus took the cricketing message to places until then starved of top-class cricket, going to remote spots as far afield as Cornwall, Lincolnshire and Ireland, travelling long hours in the most uncomfortable circumstances, by stagecoach if there was no railway line.

  The welcome they received everywhere more than made up for the hardship involved. The financial rewards did not, however, and in 1852 several of his professionals departed to set up a rival team, the United All England Eleven, in protest at Clarke’s refusal to pay them a decent wage. Local clubs were required to put up a fee of about £70, yet Clarke, who had a reputation for tight-fistedness, paid his players only £5 each (or a grudging £6 for long journeys) from which he deducted their travelling expenses.

  He retained the loyalty of most of his players, however, and for the visit to Bristol he could still muster a formidable Eleven, including some of the greatest names in English cricket: George Parr, ‘the Lion of the North’, another Nottinghamshire man, gritty and determined, a natural leader who took over the All England team from Clarke and led two of the first three overseas tours by English teams; Julius Caesar, whose magnificent name belied both his origins (he came from Goldalming, in rural Surrey), his small stature and his intensely nervous nature, but who was a fine batsman, a great exponent of the drive and the pull; the durable and evergreen Sussex wicketkeeper Thomas Box; William Caffyn, also of Surrey, a talented all-rounder known at The Oval as ‘Terrible Billy’; John Bickley, the Nottinghamshire medium-pace bowler who the previous year had taken 8–23 against England at Lord’s; Edgar ‘Ned’ Willsher, the Kent left-arm opening bowler who eight years later was to write his name in cricket history by being no-balled by John Lillywhite for overarm bowling, which led to its legalisation; and there was Clarke himself, at fifty-six nearing the end of his long career, and his son, Alfred, a capable enough batsman. So superior in ability were Clarke’s men to the local amateurs that they were quite happy to play teams of eighteen or twenty-two, and generally beat them. A visit from Clarke’s Eleven was a great social occasion, eagerly anticipated for months beforehand by a public with an appetite for good cricket that had never previously been served. Special entertainments were devised for the evenings to keep the spectators amused.

  The players wore spotted or striped shirts, ties or scarves, white trousers held up with thick belts and round bowler-style hats. They bowled four-ball overs in the round-arm style which had gradually developed in the first half of the century despite fierce opposition from defenders of the old underarm fashion and was legalised in 1835 (it was not until 1864 that the MCC finally sanctioned fully overarm bowling). Scores were usually low by modern standards, for batting was often a slow and laborious process largely because pitches and playing fields were usually primitive and sometimes downright dangerous. Richard Daft, one of Clarke’s players, remembered the great Fuller Pilch mowing one wicket with a borrowed scythe and another player running into a covey of partridges when fielding the ball at Truro.

  The ground found by Dr Grace for his great match was in this tradition. It lay behind the Full Moon Hotel at Stokes Croft (quite near the centre of Bristol nowadays) and until the previous autumn had been a ploughed field. Dr Grace’s gardener and some other men had prepared it; the pitch was said to be ‘first rate’ but the rest of the ground ‘rough and uneven’. Uncle Pocock and Alfred Grace played along with Dr Grace; little Gilbert watched with his mother who ‘sat in her pony-carriage all day’. W.G. remembered little more about the occasion than that some of the England team played in top hats, but doubtless the talk in the Grace household was of little else for months before and after the match. Despite being outnumbered two to one, Clarke’s Eleven won by 149 runs.

  The fixture was repeated the following year. Clarke was unable to play because of eye trouble – he had lost an eye playing fives at the age of 30 – but Dr Grace had three of his sons playing with him: Henry junior, Alfred, aged fifteen, and thirteen-year-old E.M., who understandably made little impression at the crease against such distinguished opposition (he scored 1 and 3). Long afterwards, E.M. remembered: ‘I was very small indeed then, and when an appeal for lbw was made against me from a ball which hit me high up in the stomach, I felt that I wasn’t tall enough to be able to doubt the umpire’s word.’ However, he fielded so well at long-stop in difficult conditions that after the match Clarke presented him with a bat and his mother with a book Cricket: Notes by W. Bollard, with a letter containing practical hints by William Clarke, in which he wrote: ‘Presented to Mrs Grace by William Clarke, Secretary All-England XI’. One can imagine seven-year-old Gilbert’s pride that his mother and brother should be singled out by such a great man. It has survived; in 1996 it fetched £4,600 at auction.

  West Gloucestershire, all twenty-two of them, made only 48 in their first innings (top score: Henry Grace, junior, 13) and 76 in the second (top score: Henry Grace, senior, 14), losing by 167 runs. Alfred Grace collected a ‘pair’. Julius Caesar, who relished inferior slow bowling, made top score (33 and 78) in both of All-England’s second innings to emphasise the disparity between the two sides. Bickley took sixteen wickets in West Gloucestershire’s first innings; indeed, only three of the home side got into double figures in the entire match. To look at the scorecard is to realise what a primitive game cricket was in those days – one can visualise the clumsy swiping that would have characterised the Bristolians’ play and the huge gap that existed between their play and that of the wily professionals. Little did they know that the dark-eyed little boy watching from the sidelines would in little more than a decade transform the face of the game, and almost single-handed overthrow the supremacy of the professional cricketer.

  The All England team returned to Bristol the following year to play a Bristol and District XXII, this time on the Clifton ground, and won again but only by twelve runs this time. By the end of the century, the field behind the Full Moon was built over.

  There is a Gracean postscript: the All England team went into decline in the 1860s and its demise was hastened by the rise of another wandering team, the United South of England. The large gates it attracted were attributed mainly to its greatest star: W.G. Grace.

  Gilbert continued to develop his talents on the pitch at The Chestnuts under his uncle’s careful tutelage, and at his boarding school. All three of his older brothers had started their cricket careers with West Gloucestershire and in 1857, at the precocious age of nine, it was Gilbert’s turn. The Bristol cricketing community had become used to the idea of precocious Graces.

  By then, Gilbert had acquired a reasonable defensive technique and was learning how to play the ball away with a bit more power, still largely on the back foot. ‘Playing with a straight bat had become easy to me; and my uncle told me I was on the right track, and patiently I continued with it.’ He made his debut for his father’s club on 19 July, the day after his ninth birthday, against Bedminster. Batting last, he made 3 not out. He played twice more that summer, both times against West Gloucestershire’s keenest rivals Clifton, adding only one more run to his career total. By the following summer, he was learning how to play forward as well as back, but was yet to play attacking shots off the front foot, and he found the going against grown men just as tough, making 4 runs in five innings in 1858, and 12 runs in nine innings in 1859.

  So far, there was little sign that Gilbert was anything special but that all changed in 1860, his twelfth year. He scored 9 in West Gloucestershire’s first game against Clifton but really came into his own in the return, a two-day affair played on 19 and 20 July. The Clifton bowling was softened up by E.M. and Alfred Pocock, who put on 126 for the first wicket, the nineteen-year-old E.M. going on to score a chanceless 150. Gilbert went in at number eight and by the close of play on the first day had scored a solid and patient 35 not out.
The next day the twelve-year-old completed his half century and was finally out for 51. His father also distinguished himself by taking all ten Clifton wickets, nine clean bowled and the tenth caught by Alfred Grace. The following weekend W.G. made 16 against a combined team from Gloucester and Cheltenham, who were beaten by an innings and 27 runs.

  He had also been working hard on his bowling and was occasionally called on by West Gloucestershire to turn his arm over, though, as he was first to admit, only when all else had failed. His batting of 1860 was something of a false dawn: the next season he made only 46 runs in ten innings, never once managing to reach double figures. He had shot up and was now tall for his age but his greater reach proved of little help that season. Perhaps his strength had not caught up with his height; more likely the opposition had got wise to his talent and did not wish to be shown up by a thirteen-year-old. The year, he recalled, ‘was not an encouraging one to me or my teachers’.

  The next year, 1862, was a little better: Gilbert managed to score 24 not out against twenty-two men of Corsham and 18 against Gentlemen of Devon, totalling 53 in five innings. That year he left Rudgway School and went back home; his subsequent education consisting of private lessons with his brother-in-law, the Rev. John Walter Dann, a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, who had married his sister Blanche and became the much loved and respected vicar of Downend for half a century, and a devoted supporter of local cricket.

  Then came a severe setback. Gilbert contracted a bad case of pneumonia and was bedridden for several weeks. In those pre-antibiotic days, pneumonia posed a real threat to life and for a while it was touch and go for the boy. He made a slow recovery but when it came it produced a rapid change. As if in reaction to the physical battering he had taken, he suddenly shot up several more inches in height, taking him to over 6 ft tall. By his fifteenth birthday in 1863, he was the tallest of the Grace brothers by several inches, and the strongest: he settled one fraternal argument by picking up his eldest brother Henry, by then a sturdy thirty-year-old weighing 12 stone, and dropping him somewhere else. He eventually grew to 6ft 2 1⁄2 inches tall, towering over most of his contemporaries, another important factor in his superiority over them.

  Fully restored to health and grown to adult size, he made a real impact on the club game in the West Country that summer, scoring 350 in nineteen innings, at an average of 26.12. His top score came in his first innings of the summer in July when he hit 86 against Clifton. A few days later he scored an unbeaten 42 against Lansdown and in August made an unbeaten 52 for an embryonic Gloucestershire side got up by his father to play Somerset at Sydenham Fields, Bath. He had made great strides with the ball too and was now considered one of his club’s leading performers. Against Somerset he took 4–17 and 2–26.

  The most notable event of the year for W.G. was that he was considered good enough to be matched against some of the best professional bowlers in the country. He was selected to play for Twenty-Two of Bristol and District against the All-England touring side at the Clifton ground at the end of August, the same fixture which he had watched enthralled as a boy of six nine years previously. It was every schoolboy’s dream and Gilbert was well aware of the enormous honour bestowed on him. He practised even more keenly in the weeks beforehand. ‘I knew right well that the contests in which I had played the last year or two were not to be compared with the contest on this occasion,’ he wrote later.

  The game rated a small mention in the weekly Clifton Chronicle, which on the same page reported the discovery by some children of the body of a newly-born baby on Brandon Hill, a packed residents’ meeting to discuss a proposed new road from Bristol up to Clifton, then as now a genteel suburb, and the ticket prices for the new Bristol and South Wales Union Railway (the charges from Bristol to Stapleton Road, where Dr W.G. Grace would open his first practice nearly twenty years later, were 6d, 4d and 1½d for first, second and third class respectively).

  William Clarke had died in 1856 but the All-England operation continued under the direction of George Parr. The team which came to Bristol consisted of some familiar faces – Julius Caesar, Ned Willsher and Alfred Clarke – plus some of the most outstanding professionals of the age. They included George Tarrant, the Cambridgeshire round-arm fast bowler, his county colleague Tom Hayward, a slim but graceful batsman, H.H. Stephenson, the Surrey all-rounder whose selection to lead the first tour party to Australia in 1861/2 greatly upset the northern professionals, the great Nottinghamshire fast bowler and the terror of Lord’s, John Jackson, R.C. Tinley, the lob bowler also of Nottinghamshire, and W.H. Moore, an amateur who had recently scored a century against the North. The Bristol team included the four oldest Grace boys: Henry, Alfred, Edward and Gilbert.

  Opening the innings, E.M. smashed a swift 37 in his usual swashbuckling style before being given out lbw to Jackson. W.G. was down to bat at number ten, half-way down the order. Lunch was taken just before he was due to bat and Tarrant, nicknamed ‘Tear’em’ or ‘Tearaway’ because of his menacing appearance as he raced in to bowl at high speed, offered to give the youngster some practice. This act of kindness was all the more surprising as Tarrant was notorious in the game for his moodiness and short temper. (Interestingly, he became a close friend of E.M. when they toured Australia and New Zealand with George Parr’s team the following winter. Perhaps the fact that both operated on a short fuse helped to cement the relationship.)

  When W.G. walked to the wicket Tarrant and Jackson were bowling, an awesome prospect for a fifteen-year-old but one which W.G. took in his stride, though he confessed to suffering from nerves before going out to bat. After a couple of overs Tinley was brought on to bowl his under-arm lobs. They held no terrors for W.G., who was well used to batting against E.M.’s lobs at home. He played the first over cautiously, then showed his mettle in the next over, pulling Tinley into the scoring tent. The crowd’s enthusiastic reception is easy to imagine. Unfortunately for the teenager, the success went to his head. In the next over he gave Tinley the charge, missed and was bowled, not the first or last time a headstrong young batsman has been undone by a wily pro. Still, W.G. walked off with a highly respectable 32 to his credit and professed himself thrilled with his performance. He had made the fourth best score, and fared better than his other brothers: Henry made a duck and Alfred 3 in a total of 212.

  All England performed poorly against the enthusiastic Bristolians and were forced to follow on after making only 86 in their first innings, E.M. taking five wickets. The England stars fared little better in their second knock. When Edwin Stephenson, of Yorkshire, no mean batsman, came in, E.M. handed W.G. the ball, told him to toss it up and took himself off to the outfield. Sure enough, Stephenson swallowed the bait in W.G.’s first over, E.M. pulling off a magnificent catch to give the young man a distinguished first scalp at top level. All England were all out for 106, E.M. taking another five wickets. The Bristol XXII had won by an innings and 20 runs in under two days, although three had been set aside for the match. The result indicated the improvement in the Bristol players’ standards over their past decade, thanks in no small part to Dr Grace’s efforts. By now, E.M. was recognised as one of the finest players in the country.

  W.G. finished off his season for West Gloucestershire in the autumnal conditions of October with 35 and 2 against Cheltenham College. But, for all his burgeoning self-confidence, he and his family cannot have realised just how rapidly he was progressing. That he was to demonstrate in style the following summer.

  He was still only fifteen years when in June 1864 he was invited to play for the All-England XI against Lansdown. That the invitation was extended at all indicates that he must have mightily impressed the canny old All-England pros during his brief knock against them the previous summer. Perhaps it was a tribute to the Grace family’s influence, though E.M. was absent, still making his way home from Australia after the completion of Parr’s tour. His oldest brother Henry played for Lansdown. W.G. batted at number six and found himself at the wicket with the great
John Lillywhite, who made a nonchalant century. W.G. batted with care, scoring 15 in half an hour until he had the misfortune to be run out by Lillywhite, the teenager presumably not daring to countermand the great man’s call. ‘I did not mind that,’ he manfully recalled. ‘I had played for the All England Eleven.’ The professionals duly won by an innings and 22 runs.

  It was E.M.’s continuing absence that led to W.G.’s first game in London ten days later. For years various members of the clan had been invited by the South Wales Club to join its annual tour to London, the Graces being popular figures on the cricket fields of the principality. Henry suggested that W.G. take E.M.’s place and the young man was off to the capital for the first time in his life. His journey was nearly in vain. The first game was at The Oval against Surrey. When the brothers arrived, the Welsh captain, Mr J. Lloyd, took Henry aside and asked him if his brother would mind stepping down for the second match, against Gentlemen of Sussex at Hove, as he wanted to include a more experienced player. He reckoned without the Graces’ unflinching sense of family solidarity. Henry was firm: Gilbert would play in both matches or neither. Indeed Henry went further: if Gilbert wasn’t picked, he himself would not play and no Graces would ever appear for South Wales again. Lloyd backed down. W.G. scored 5 and 38 but the real fireworks came on 14, 15 and 16 July at the historic Hove ground, one of cricket’s most splendid arenas, and left Lloyd looking very stupid indeed.