WG Grace

by Low, Robert

  ‘If we are to take this eleven as a sample … of the best English cricket then I say English cricket has certainly not improved since Parr’s visit [in 1863/64]’ declared a Melbourne cricket writer.

  Grace himself is an extraordinary run-getter, a perfect wonder, and worth going miles to see every day in the week – and in eleven-a-side matches, to use a colonial phrase, ‘a caution’ to bowlers – but he is alone … He is a freak of nature, a phenomenon.

  I fancy Mr Grace has by this time found out his mistake in not bringing out another first-class bowler, and no doubt he wished during that first match that he had had Shaw and Emmett or Freeman with him.

  Grace himself is the only one the colonials have to fear; he must hit catches at times – his style of hitting cannot prevent him so doing.

  Looking ahead to England’s return engagement with a Victoria XVIII, he wrote that if England were to win, ‘Mr W.G. Grace must do it alone.’

  Australians were as sensitive to slights as they are today. W.G. trod on a few toes by declaring to a visitor from Sydney that his team would easily defeat a New South Wales XVIII when they reached that city.

  If the journey to Stawell had been bad, the next stage to Warrnambool, a pretty seaside village, was even worse. Heavy rain made the track almost impassable in places. Half of the party had to get out of the coach at Hexham because they were too heavy a load. ‘Of all my travelling experiences, that coach ride … was the most unpleasant,’ Grace recorded. ‘The first thirty-one miles took five hours and a quarter.’ The 91-mile journey took nineteen hours and the party finally arrived drenched and exhausted. W.G. was so fed up that he declined to attend a banquet laid on by the cricket club. When he finally got to bed and fell asleep, he was not best pleased to be awoken by a local reporter anxious to interview the distinguished visitor, an early example of the enterprise and persistence of Australian journalists, though this one departed without much of a story from his disgruntled interviewee.

  The chief topic of interest among local aficionados was whether a popular sporting figure had died or not: this was an Aboriginal cricketer named Mullagh, who lived on a government station in the Wimmera district and of whom nothing had been heard for some time, giving rise to fears that he had expired. The authorities did not approve of Aboriginals playing cricket, ‘believing that its pursuit leads them into temptation as regards drink’, according to the local paper, which seems a fair enough assessment of the dangers of associating with cricketers for too long.

  Although after their journey the Englishmen felt considerably below par they managed to put on a decent performance against the Warrnambool XXII on a better pitch and before another big crowd, estimated at around three thousand people, for whom such a visit would have been a welcome diversion. Grace was bowled by ‘an easy full-pitched ball’ for 18. ‘The fall of the champion’s wicket was signalised [sic] by the wildest shouts and congratulations on the part of the provincials, who screamed, leaped, rolled and turned somersaults, and hugged each other in their excess of joy,’ wrote one reporter.

  England won by nine wickets inside a day and a half, avoiding liquor and concentrating on the job in hand. They filled out the remainder of the scheduled three-day match with single-wicket games. On the third day the professionals again had to play while the amateurs went fishing and shooting. W.G. rode out with a group of stockmen in search of kangaroos, revelling in the day’s sport. Then it was back to Melbourne, by boat, through rough seas on a small coastal steamer stinking of oil. ‘Till then I had never spent so wretched a night on board ship,’ lamented Grace, the bad sailor.

  Pausing in Melbourne to pick up Agnes, W.G. and company sailed on to Sydney, through more stormy seas, arriving to a dockside packed with some five thousand cheering people. After a public breakfast at a hotel, there was a series of toasts, which, according to W.G., were ‘carried to an extreme in Australia’. He was only too aware of the effect of too much socialising on his players.

  Whether they had had a drink or not, the Englishmen’s display against a New South Wales XVIII was little better than it had been in the first four games. Again there was a huge and expectant crowd, estimated at ten to twelve thousand on the first day and nine thousand on the second. Again victory went to the Australians, this time by eight wickets. There was a Grace family connection on the NSW side too in the person of the son of Uncle Pocock, who had so patiently coached the Grace boys on the lawn at Downend. But though young Pocock contributed to NSW’s win, there was a more significant player in his side: Frederick Spofforth, who was to develop into the greatest Australian fast bowler of the century. Born at Balmain, then just outside Sydney, now a suburb of the city, he stood 6ft 3in tall and was raw but full of promise, taking 2–16 in England’s second innings.

  W.G. was out cheaply in both England’s innings, each time in identical fashion, caught at slip by Lawrence off Coates, ‘a coincidence which does not often happen’ he remarked later. The crowd went mad at the sight of the great Englishman departing. He had some sort of revenge with the ball, however, taking 18–82 in the match, including 7–13 in the second innings. The match barely lasted into the third day, so a single-wicket game was put on for the benefit of those spectators who had turned up. The NSW men scored 29, W.G. alone made 28 and with two byes the tourists won easily enough.

  Next day the party was entertained to a picnic and boat trip around Sydney Harbour, a delightful day which stayed fresh in W.G.’s memory for decades. On the cricket front, the schedule was hastily changed when heavy rain submerged the pitch at Maitland, where the next match was due to be played. To the tourists’ relief, it was called off, thus obviating another voyage through rough seas. Grace was of the opinion that the effects of so many sea journeys had contributed greatly to his team’s poor performances. Instead, a game was arranged at Bathurst, 140 miles inland, which meant a spectacular and at times hairy train journey through the Blue Mountains to the terminus, five miles from their destination. A brass band and a large number of locals accompanied the party into town.

  Fortunately for the visitors, the twenty-two local cricketers assembled to play on an indifferent and inadequately rolled pitch were not very good and the Englishmen dealt with them efficiently, winning by eight wickets (W.G. 27 and 16, G.F. 38 and 9 not out). A Bathurst resident wagered Mrs Grace a pair of gloves that her husband would not hit the ball out of the ground and won his bet, although W.G. did manage one hit over the scorebox. After a banquet and dance which went on into the small hours, and a morning’s quail shooting for W.G., the party returned to Sydney for the most important match of the tour against a combined Victoria and NSW side, the Australians being so confident of their prospects that they fielded only fifteen instead of eighteen or twenty-two.

  The game had split the Melbourne cricket community in two: the Melbourne Cricket Club committee thought that the six players invited to appear for the combination XV would do better to stay and play in some important inter-Melbourne matches, and at first forbade them from going on pain of suspension should they defy the order. Their stance was widely ridiculed and the committee forced to back down. The six proceeded to Sydney. One of them was the opening bowler Cosstick, who had played so well against the Englishmen in the first tour match. He soon proved troublesome again on the opening morning of the Sydney game, removing W.G.’s off stump when he had scored only 9, to the delight of the five thousand spectators present at the Albert ground.

  Grace must have been disappointed not to have done better on a pitch described as ‘hard as a rock and smooth as a billiard table’. With the temperature at 100° F in the shade, England scored 170, thanks to a spirited unbeaten 55 by McIntyre batting at number eleven. The combined XV were dismissed for 96 halfway through the second day. W.G. was given four ‘lives’ in his second knock but was still a class above everyone else on the pitch. At the end of the day he was on 56 not out and went on to 73 before being well caught on the leg-side boundary. ‘His cricket has been a treat,’ commented
one observer. ‘He placed many balls with an ease which must have irritated bowlers and fielders; and he ran, with Jupp and Greenwood, numerous “little ones” with a daring which would have been fatal to less excellent runners or inferior judges.’

  Two incidents involving him and the English umpire, Boult, did not endear him to the Australian players, press or public. As the Combined XV’s Gregory was about to bowl he noticed W.G., at the non-striker’s end, out of his crease and whipped the bails off. Boult turned down his appeal, on the extraordinary ground that he had not broken the wicket ‘from in front’ and Grace was reprieved. ‘Have the laws of cricket in England been altered to this effect?’ queried the Australasian. ‘Are they utterly disorganised? Or are they intact, but unstudied by this latest specimen of the amateur umpire?’

  This was followed by an altogether more serious fracas on the third and final day when the Australians were set an impossible 309 to win in three hours. They understandably attempted to play out time and escape with a draw. The English bowlers started to winkle them out and, with six Australians already back in the pavilion, Boult, standing at square leg, gave Sam Cosstick out hit wicket. Cosstick walked off insisting he had not touched his wicket and there was vocal protest from the crowd. When he reached the pavilion, his team-mates told Cosstick he had been given out by the wrong umpire and he returned to the crease where, by this time, his replacement was already installed. Grace protested that three batsmen was one too many but Cosstick stood his ground, awaiting a ruling from the umpire at the bowler’s end. He, however, said nobody had appealed to him and, with no movement from Cosstick, Grace marched his players off the field.

  The authorities intervened and eventually managed to persuade Cosstick to depart. After that the Englishmen wrapped up the game just before the scheduled close and won by 218 runs, Lillywhite returning figures of 9–33. It was an emphatic victory over a strong side; Grace’s men had at last shown the form of which they were capable. The crowd swarmed on to the pitch in front of the pavilion at the end of the match and insisted that all the England players parade one by one to be applauded, but the manner in which Grace had behaved was not to everyone’s taste. There were plenty of Australians who were sensitive to any hint of arrogance by visiting Englishmen. One reporter wrote: ‘Tonight we shall see the last of the English Eleven – at least such is the fervent hope of all in this city who care to see the game played in a courteous and manly spirit … In this colony, at least, we have an intense distaste for bumptious and overbearing captains.’

  Back they went to Melbourne on the by-now familiar coastal steamer – two days of seasickness out of three – and then inland again to Sandhurst, another goldmining town, for a match against a local XXII which, for once, did not contain any reinforcements from outside. It was a dry and dusty place, the only green in sight being the cricket ground, which was surrounded by young trees. Opinions differed about the state of the pitch: W.G., who thought the Australians very backward and cavalier in their pitch preparation, described this one as dry, crumbling and dangerous; locals thought it ‘carefully prepared’. Grace’s reaction to a bad pitch was often to attack the bowling – to hit rather than be hit – and this was one such occasion. He scored 53 and 72 not out. England had an easy victory: Lillywhite for 1875 summarised it thus: ‘Mr W.G. Grace won by seven wickets.’

  There was great excitement at their next port of call, Castlemaine, until recently a mining boom town whose gold had run out and whose cricketers had beaten the first English touring side back in 1861/62, the only Victoria side to do so. The latest tourists were borne to the ground, three miles outside town, in a coach drawn by four cattle. The facilities were simple. The Australasian reported apologetically: ‘The accommodation for dressing was not quite palatial, the place which “the greatest cricketer of all time” had to uncover his nether limbs in being merely a structure of branches enclosed on three sides only, a sort of enlarged gunyah, in fact – rather different to the pavilion at Lord’s, or the dressing-room at Canterbury.’ The pitch was, inevitably, just as primitive, the ball shooting around in highly menacing fashion.

  The locals were shot out for 57 and when England replied, W.G. coped superbly. ‘Mr Grace frequently played balls down that rose breast high in a way that surprised the countrymen, who were accustomed to see their own men bob their heads and let such go by.’ His score of 30, out of 76 all out, was the highest of the match. It included one let-off when the president of the Castlemaine team caught him on the leg-side boundary but fell over the ropes as he did so. As a hit over the boundary counted five, the scorers did not know what to give Grace. According to Grace, he was granted only the single which he had run while the ball was in the air. ‘As I had a keen suspicion that I ought to have been given out, I did not argue out the point,’ he wrote later. Interestingly, the local newspaper reported him as being given the full five runs. Castlemaine were dismissed for 58 in their second innings and England made 40–5 to win by five wickets. Grace declined to open and, going in at seven, faced only one ball, to his great relief. As always, there were toasts and speeches during the luncheon interval. One reporter, referring to the controversies which had dogged the tour, stated that one speaker ‘commented on the inhospitable way in which the [English] Eleven had been treated and spoken of elsewhere, and said that Castlemaine was determined to treat their guests as guests, and as the real good fellows they were’. He added: ‘The Eleven were loudly cheered on leaving for Melbourne.’

  There they played a return match against Victoria, who confidently reduced their numbers to fifteen but were weakened by late withdrawals, so much so that the match organisers had to scour the city for substitutes on the morning of the first day. The weather had turned cold and the attendance poor: no more than two thousand people. England won convincingly by seven wickets, though Grace, who had been averaging a respectable 42 on the tour thus far, failed this time, scoring only nine before a break-back surprised him into lifting the ball to cover.

  He didn’t bother to bat in the second innings, with only 50 to make, but as the match ended early on the third day, a Saturday, the promoters organised an exhibition match to see how only eleven Victorians would fare against the Englishmen. It gave the crowd the opportunity to see Grace in full flow; he rattled up a brisk 126.

  ‘The exposition of batting given by Mr W.G. Grace … was a treat, the ease and power with which he put the bowling about for singles, doubles, trebles and quartettes, with only eleven in the field, being wonderful,’ wrote one reporter. ‘His placing past short leg and point was plainly noticeable, and his swiftness between the wickets was positively ludicrous when Jupp was his partner.’ His pièce de résistance was a hit for five – ‘picked clean off the toes, far and high out of the ground, pitching on the top of the marquee in the ladies’ reserve, it fairly “brought down the house”.’

  The opposing team, pressed into bowling and fielding to this onslaught, were less than happy about it. One of the bowlers grew so frustrated that eventually he threw a delivery at Grace, to general embarrassment. And when there was a pause for refreshments to be brought on, two fielders left the field and did not return, causing a further delay while substitutes were found.

  Next stop for the tourists was Tasmania, entailing a twenty-nine-hour voyage on the vessel The Tamar, at first in the rough waters with which the Englishmen were becoming wearyingly familiar and ‘which left “The Eleven” with scarcely strength enough to return the cheers of welcome that greeted them at the little wharf’ at Launceston. Next day W.G. and his cousin Gilbert went shooting while the rest of the team fished at a place called the Cataracts.

  Their match against XXII of Launceston started next day. W.G. lost the toss and the locals batted. There was a crowd of around twelve hundred, including ‘a strong muster of elegantly-dressed ladies’ and the Earl of Donnoughmore, who happened to be passing through. A correspondent wrote scornfully: ‘The Tasmanians were seized with a very bad fit of the “funks”, going to the
wickets but to be sent back again, declaring the bowling to be utter rubbish, and that they ought to have stayed in against it all day – but they didn’t’, a situation familiar to every cricketer who has ever played the game. They were all out for 90, the only innings of consequence coming from J.C. Lord, formerly of Hampshire, and E.H. Butler, who played one game for the Gentlemen v Players on a visit to England. In reply, W.G. and Jupp each made 33 against bowling so tight that Grace, unusually for him, managed not a single boundary. Fred Grace suffered no such inhibitions in a brisk 45 which a local observer called ‘as fine an exhibition of cricket’ as he had ever seen, ‘hitting hard and clean, and defence perfect’. England made 247 and won by an innings and 32 runs.

  For a change, a pleasant coach-ride along a well-made road took them to Hobart and a match against Twenty-Two of South Tasmania before a big crowd, including the Governor, the local judges and other dignitaries. Again Fred Grace was the star of the show, with a brilliant 154, the highest score to date by an Englishman in Australia and the highest ever registered in Tasmania. W.G. made 29 and England won by eight wickets. The match was followed by a dinner-dance and W.G. was able to fit in a rabbit shoot, in which ‘a snake or two’ was also bagged before the party returned to the mainland for the last three matches of an arduous tour.

  Back in Melbourne, England faced a Victoria XVIII for the third and final game of their series. It was all-square and all to play for. Many realised that it might be their last chance to see the world’s greatest batsman in action. ‘It is quite possible that colonial players will never see Mr Grace in the brilliant form he is now,’ wrote one journalist, ‘for men are but mortal and cannot retain their best form for ever in the cricket-field, any more than can horses on a race-course.’