by Low, Robert
In the event South Wales played with only ten men so the whole unpleasantness had been unnecessary but it meant W.G. was under some pressure to do well. He responded in extraordinary fashion, confessing that the events at the Oval had placed even greater pressure on his shoulders. E.M.’s ship was known to be nearing England and W.G. hung on to the hope that his inspirational older brother might turn up at Hove and help out. He need not have worried.
South Wales won the toss and W.G. went in first wicket down, joining Lloyd in the middle. There he proceeded to give the captain a close-up demonstration of just how mistaken he had been. He scored 170 out of a total of 356 for nine, hitting 19 fours and dominating the day’s proceedings before wearily chopping an attempted cut on to his stumps.
W.G. claimed it was chanceless but one of the Sussex bowlers thought he should have been caught at point going for a fourth consecutive boundary. Lloyd contributed 82 but was eclipsed by his young partner. W.G. had arrived on the big stage with a bang. That afternoon he heard that E.M. had in fact arrived back in England that day.
In South Wales’s second innings W.G. dominated again, scoring 56 not out in a total of 118–5, though the Welshmen failed by 16 runs to win the match. The Gentlemen of Sussex presented W.G with a bat to mark his epic performance. He treasured it all his life; it marked the real beginning of his magnificent career. He was not quite sixteen years old.
Six days later the prodigy made his first appearance at Lord’s, again for South Wales, against MCC and Ground, and again he made a huge impression. He went in first wicket down and made 50, the second highest score. This would have been quite an achievement by any standards, but it was made all the more meritorious by the dreadful conditions the batsman faced, even at the home of cricket. The pitch, uncared for, full of holes and covered with small pebbles, was lethal; that very summer Sussex refused to play there because of it. Surrey had done the same in 1859. The creases were not marked with chalk but were inch-deep trenches which deteriorated rapidly. W.G. himself recounted that an over might contain three ‘shooters’ but also balls that hit the stones and reared up at the batsman. The only boundary was if a ball hit the pavilion rails; otherwise everything had to be run. One spectator was Charles Alcock, secretary of Surrey cricket club and editor of Lillywhite’s Annual. He was mightily impressed by the youngster, as he wrote years later:
I can recall his form as if it were yesterday; his straight and true bowling – much faster than it is now, and not quite so high in delivery – the wonderful straightness of his bat, and the wonderful push off the leg stump, the stroke that has made him famous above every other cricketer of the age.
It may have been a relief to go on from the Lord’s pitch north to Southgate in Middlesex, where W.G. made 14. Then he returned to Lord’s for a two-day game against I Zingari, the last of the London season. It opened on 28 July, W.G.’s sixteenth birthday, and to celebrate he and E.M., opening the innings together for the first time, put on 81 before W.G. was out for 34. He made 47 in the second innings to round a memorable first expedition to the capital. For South Wales that summer he averaged 48, and in all matches he topped a thousand runs (totalling 1,079), including 126 for Clifton v Fownes’s XI in August. He had forced his way on to the national cricket stage, and was not to take his leave until the next century. John Lillywhite’s Companion commented soberly: ‘Mr W.G. Grace promises to be a good bat; bowls very fairly.’
W.G. spent the winter of 1864–5 in customary fashion, hunting, shooting and fishing with his brothers. He always walked long distances too and in this way he kept fit for the cricket season. Now that he had suddenly exploded on to the scene, W.G. was in great demand in the summer of 1865. Everybody wanted the extraordinary youth from Gloucestershire in their team. Was he really as good as his performances the previous summer appeared to indicate?
With Henry and E.M., he turned out in June for a Lansdown Club Eighteen against the United All England Eleven, the professional touring troupe set up by disgruntled former members of William Clarke’s All-England outfit. E.M. was the dominant figure of the match, hitting a magnificent 121 including a six into the river Avon. The Grace brothers had the distinction of taking all the wickets in each of the opposition’s innings, All England being dismissed for the paltry totals of 99 and 87.
When W.G. accompanied E.M. to play against Marlborough College, one of the school team was R.F. Miles, who later played with them for Gloucestershire. He recalled W.G. as ‘a long lanky boy, who bowled very straight with a good natural leg curl.’
W.G.’s first chance to display his progress away from the West Country that summer came with an invitation to play for the Gentlemen of the South against the Players of the South at The Oval, starting on 22 June 1865. Such was the Gentlemen’s confidence in the prodigy that he went in first wicket down, an honour which he himself felt was unjustified. Perhaps weighed down by the responsibility, he was soon back in the pavilion, out, stumped for a duck. But this failure was more than outweighed by his success with the ball. Bowling unchanged through both the Players’ innings, he took 5–44 in the first innings and followed up with the extraordinary figures of 8–40 in the second to secure victory for the Gentlemen by an innings and 58 runs. The opinions of the professionals at being skittled by a sixteen-year-old were not recorded. The Surrey club presented him with the ball, inscribed and mounted.
Ten days later, on the same ground, W.G. made his first appearance in a match which he was to dominate for the next forty-one years, the fixture that embodied the yawning social gulf that divided the game, Gentlemen v Players. The fortunes of the two teams charted the progress of the sport. For the previous decade, it had been dominated by the professionals; the Players had beaten the Gentlemen in nineteen consecutive games since 1854 (in those days the fixture was played twice a season, at Lord’s and The Oval). It is no exaggeration to say that W.G.’s arrival transformed it: his last appearance for the Gentlemen would be in 1906 at The Oval and in that time they lost only four more times. He was to dominate the fixture as no one else before or since, scoring 6,008 runs and taking 276 wickets. He made fifteen centuries, more than any other batsman, and frequently carried his team to success on his own shoulders.
W.G.’s debut at The Oval was the first time Lord Cobham had seen him. He provided this impression of him:
He was a tall, loose-limbed lean boy, with some appearance of delicacy and, in marked contrast with his brother E.M., quiet and shy in manner. He looked older than he was, and indications of the great beard which subsequently distinguished him through life were even then apparent.
W.G. turned in a solid all-round performance, again impressing more by his bowling than his batting: and catching the eye with a superb display of fielding at cover-point. He batted eighth and scored 23 and 12 not out, impressing one of the 5,000 spectators with his ‘excellent form’. At least he outscored E.M., who opened the batting but made only 8 and 10. In the Players’ first innings W.G. had figures of 40–9–65–4, in the second 35–12–60–3, a lot of bowling and a highly economical performance in a high-scoring game. It was his assessment that the batting of the teams was about equal but the professionals’ bowling was far superior, even though they were without all their northern stars, who had refused to take part. They still won comfortably enough, by 118 runs.
It was a different story five days later in the return match at Lord’s. This was a much more low-scoring affair, because of the dreadful pitch, ‘almost unplayable’ according to R.D. Walker of the Gentlemen. It was dominated by the ageing George Parr, who scored 60 for the Players in his last appearance in the fixture he had graced since 1846, and the irrepressible E.M. There was a fitting circularity about the appearances of Parr and W.G. When Parr was first picked for the Players he had been only eighteen and the selection of one so young was thought to be exceptional. Now, as he bowed out, a similar prodigy who was even younger had arrived.
The Players won the toss and batted but were all out for only 132. W.G.
opened the bowling but took no wickets. It was the first time C.E. Green, later a great figure in Essex cricket, had seen W.G. in action. He described his bowling action at the time:
In those days his arm was as high as his shoulder – that is as high as it was then allowed by cricket law – and while his delivery was a nice one, his action was different to what it was in his later days; it was more slinging and his pace was fast medium. He had not then acquired any of his subsequent craftiness with the ball. He used to bowl straight on the wicket, trusting to the ground to do the rest.
W.G. and E.M. opened the batting for the Gentlemen but the partnership was short-lived: W.G. was run out for only 3. E.M.’s innings was typically explosive: he hit a six through a bedroom window of the old tavern and was then given out lbw for 24 ‘at which decision dissatisfaction was loudly expressed by some of the spectators’, according to The Times. The Gentlemen made 198, E.M. taking six wickets, and then dismissed the Players for 140, leaving themselves only 75 to win. The Grace brothers saw to it that the target was reached without trouble, W.G. making 34, E.M. 30. The Gentlemen’s eight-wicket victory was their first in nineteen fixtures. The tide had turned.
There was plenty more action for W.G. at the top level that summer. A week later he played for The Gentlemen of England v The Gentlemen of Middlesex at Islington, Middlesex’s county ground, where E.M. continued his rich vein of form with 111 in the second innings. W.G. contributed 48 and 34. His highest score of the summer was 85, for South Wales against I Zingari and he was disappointed not to have made a century. He even found himself playing for Suffolk when he popped into Lord’s one day and was pressed into service by the county, who were two men short for the match against MCC, underlining the casual nature of much of cricket in those days. There was no fairytale ending, alas: W.G. failed in both innings with the bat and had to watch in the field while E.M. (who else?) struck a refulgent 82.
Further recognition came with selection for England v Surrey at The Oval in the last major match of the season, although his was clearly not yet a household name: in its preview The Times called him Mr N.G. Grace. Several thousand spectators were in attendance to see him opening with E.M. He batted solidly for 35, the brothers putting on more than 80 before being parted. Rain denied W.G. the chance of another knock, causing the match to be abandoned on the second day. The season ended on a note of low comedy, with E.M. inevitably at the centre of a highly controversial incident, which threatened to spoil a benefit match between a Gentlemen of the South of England XVIII and the United South of England, played at The Oval to raise money for the professional bowlers attached to the ground.
E.M. had already scored half-centuries in each of the Gentlemen’s innings and was clearly in high spirits. The renowned stonewaller Henry Jupp was at the wicket, determined to save the game in the final innings. All else having failed to remove him, E.M. announced that he knew how to do so. He was variously reported as saying ‘I’ll give him a high toss’ and ‘I can do it with a lob.’
Whatever the precise words, the intention was clear: E.M. delivered a high under-arm lob which rose some 15 yards into the air before descending towards the startled batsman. Jupp hit it away for 2 but E.M. was not put off. He ignored the booing of a section of the crowd and his next ball was a similar one. The difference was that Jupp left it alone. Unfortunately for him it landed on his wicket and the umpire gave him out. He walked, albeit reluctantly, but the crowd was was incensed. The game was held up for an hour while the spectators made their displeasure known in the frankest terms. So menacing was the atmosphere that E.M. and a couple of his team-mates grabbed stumps with which to defend themselves in case a riot started. Eventually the crowd quietened down and the game restarted. After it E.M. was presented with two bats to mark his half-centuries, for the seventy-fifth time. What he did with all his bats is unclear – probably the hammering they received meant their lives were short.
The season had been a constant learning curve for W.G: he found professional bowling a very different proposition from the amateur stuff he was used to, and it required all his patience to adjust to their consistent length. ‘I took no liberties,’ he gravely observed. The difference between first-class and other bowling was evident in his batting averages for 1865. In all matches, he scored 2,169 runs at an average of 40. But in his eight first-class innings, he managed only 189 runs at an average of 27. Still, as the summer came to an end he felt he was making progress.
Over the winter W.G. continued to grow and by the start of the 1866 season, he stood 6 ft 1 in tall and weighed nearly 12 stone. He warmed up for the first-class season with the usual round of local matches, hitting two centuries for Clifton and another for Bedminster. Then he made his first journey away from the south and west to sample cricket in the North. E.M. had been asked to captain eighteen Colts of Nottingham and Sheffield against the might of the All England XI at Sheffield, but when E.M. was unable to fulfil the engagement his brilliant younger brother was invited to take over. It was both an honour and a challenge for a seventeen-year-old, particularly in an alien atmosphere.
W.G. found it a strange experience. He and his team had to climb a steep hill to get to the Hyde Park ground, which he found very primitive, though he had no criticism of the pitch. The industrial landscape of Sheffield was obviously an eye-opener to the country boy from Gloucestershire. ‘I felt as if I had got to the world’s end, and a very black and sooty one it seemed,’ he wrote later. The youthful XVIII was soundly beaten but W.G. scored 9 and 36 and performed creditably enough as captain.
His next major engagement was for the Gentlemen v the Players at Lord’s, beginning on 26 June. Before a crowd estimated at between four and five thousand the Players won the toss and batted. E.M. and W.G. bowled through most of the innings, including a spell of eighteen overs in which they conceded only 3 runs. They shared all the wickets, six to E.M., four to W.G.
The Players made only 116 but the Gentlemen only 20 more, W.G. top-scoring on the usual difficult Lord’s track with 25, all singles. Thanks to a magnificent 122 by Tom Hearne in their second innings, the Players ran out winners by 38 runs (W.G. taking two more wickets but contributing only 11 runs in the Gentlemen’s second innings).
The return match started next day at The Oval, W.G. contributing greatly to victory for the Gentlemen by taking nine wickets in the game, though he did little with the bat. It was the Gentlemen’s first win at The Oval since the fixure had been played there, and the secretary of the Surrey club presented each member of the team with a bat to mark the milestone. W.G.’s mediocre form made his performance, when once again invited to play for an England XI against Surrey at The Oval at the end of July, all the more unexpected. Batting at number five, he scored 224, his first double century and the highest individual score at The Oval until then. He had just turned eighteen. In that massive total there were only two fives and eight fours. All the runs were literally that, reflecting W.G.’s superb state of fitness.
He was in his physical prime, tall but slim and brilliantly athletic, so much so that his captain, the great Middlesex all-rounder, V.E. Walker, benevolently allowed him to take the second afternoon of the game off, while his side was fielding, to compete in a big athletics competition, the National Olympian Association meeting, at the Crystal Palace, several miles away. Perhaps he thought the young man deserved a rest. Shrugging off the effects of his mammoth score, W.G. won the 440 yards hurdles in 1min 10 sec, considered then to be a fast time, before returning to The Oval, although he need not have bothered. In their two innings the eleven men of Surrey were unable to equal even his score, never mind England’s, and lost by an innings and 296 runs.
Between 1866 and 1870 W.G. was almost as keen on running as playing cricket, and with E.M., he was an enthusiastic competitor at athletic meetings throughout the summer, usually in Bristol and neighbouring towns like Cheltenham, but sometimes travelling to London for major events. Races were often sponsored by public houses and held on the road, with han
dicaps, substantial prizes for the winners and a great deal of betting from the spectators. The main venue in Bristol for organised meetings was the Zoological Gardens at Clifton, where the organisation was frequently chaotic.
W.G. was an excellent sprinter and hurdler, who would run in sprints ranging from the 100 yards (in which his best time was a highly creditable 10.45 seconds) to the 400 yards (52.15). He would sometimes enter field events such as the long jump, the high jump, the hop skip and jump (as the triple jump was then called), and throwing the cricket ball, in which he was a mighty performer with a best of 117 yards.
In 1869 when he recorded seventeen firsts and nine seconds he was at his peak, but the next season, in which he competed in fewer meetings, turned out to be his last. He also played the growing game of rugby football a few times, and must have been a formidable performer, but one crushing tackle from an opponent of similar proportions convinced him that he could endanger his cricket career if he carried on, a surprisingly modern approach.
His epic knock at The Oval was no flash in the pan, and may even have been bettered in terms of quality by his display at the end of August for the Gentlemen of the South against the Players of the South, at The Oval, rapidly becoming his favourite ground. The Gentlemen were acknowledged to be fielding an under-strength side but that only served to inspire the young Gloucestershire colossus. First he rattled through the Players with the ball, taking 7–92, including the obdurate Jupp for the third time in major matches that summer. Then he surpassed that – and himself – with the bat, scoring a brilliant 173 not out, of 240 while he was at the wicket, with two sixes, two fives, 14 threes and 16 twos. Cricket reports in the newspapers of the day were apt to be curt affairs, detailing little more than the scores and conveying little or nothing of the atmosphere of the day’s play. But The Times correspondent was roused to rare superlatives: