by Low, Robert
Stylish he may not have been but all agree that Grace somehow dominated from the very beginning of an innings. According to Lord Hawke, he liked to get off the mark as quickly as possible, just as Bradman was to do. His philosophy was simple (‘No one ever had a more unanalytic brain,’ remarked Edward Lyttelton): to put bat to ball, not the other way round. ‘There has never been any show about his play,’ wrote Richard Daft, who played with and against him for the best part of three decades. W.G. seldom, if ever, left the ball alone, a custom he abhorred. If it was a good ball, he would defend against it. If it was a bad one, it was there to be despatched.
He always sought to hit the ball hard but he never seemed to over-exert himself, combining strength and timing to perfection. Charles Francis noted: ‘He was never what I should call a big hitter … I have seen him hit a ball out of Lord’s … but it was not very often that he opened his huge shoulders in that way.’ Francis reflected: ‘What always struck me about his own peculiar style was that he made batting look so ludicrously easy, the ball always seemed to hit the middle of his bat, his timing was so exact, he was never too soon or too late.’ P.J. de Paravicini made almost exactly the same observations: ‘The biggest hit never seemed the slightest effort. He did not appear to put out any greater strength for a huge drive than for a mere block.’
Like all the greats, he played straight, at least until middle-age. He claimed to abhor the pull to leg of the ball pitched just outside the off stump. When it was put to him that he himself played that stroke successfully, he retorted, ‘But I never pulled a ball until I was forty years of age.’ And, as all great batsmen, he had an uncanny ability to place the ball between the fielders rather than straight at them – it must be remembered that he often had to contend with twenty-two. Daft described this gift as ‘truly marvellous’.
Another difference with the game of today is that boundaries were only gradually introduced during W.G.’s career, so that many of his greatest innings consisted almost entirely of singles, which entailed an extraordinary amount of running between the wickets. Despite appearances, in later life at least, he was superbly fit. Many noticed how he never seemed to tire, but even after reaching a century would proceed relentlessly on. ‘His astounding feats with the bat,’ wrote Daft, ‘could have been accomplished by no man, however good a player, who was not possessed of great physical advantages, and iron constitution, and who did not live temperately … In my opinion, the two great secrets of his success have been his great self-denial and his constant practise [sic].’
W.G. agreed wholeheartedly. ‘Temperance in food and drink, regular sleep and exercise, I have laid down as the golden rule from my earliest cricketing days … The capacity for making long scores is not a thing of a day’s growth … Great scores at cricket, like great work of any kind, are, as a rule, the results of years of careful and judicious training and not accidental occurrences.’
Which modern batsman resembles him most? I believe the nearest we have seen is Graham Gooch, who has many of W.G.’s characteristics: a formidable physical presence, devotion to fitness, not particularly stylish but highly effective, a ruthless accumulator of runs who never tired of batting and was still as good as anyone else in the country in his mid-forties.
W.G. was also patient, a discipline he had learned young. ‘He was not in the strict sense a quick-scoring batsman, for he was content over after over to treat each ball on its merits,’ wrote Gilbert Jessop, who joined W.G.’s Gloucestershire side when the great man was in his late forties. ‘At the same time his mastery of all the strokes made run-getting appear a supremely easy matter.’
He could dig in and defend when the occasion demanded. Indeed, there are many instances of him being the only batsman in his side with the skill and determination to stay in on a bad wicket. The fact that he was reared in an era when pitches were poor, unreliable and often downright dangerous was a big factor in his make-up. He learned as a boy how to keep out ‘grubbers’ and it was not until he was approaching the age of thirty that pitches generally started to improve in quality. He therefore amassed some of his greatest innings on various dubious surfaces. A legacy of that period, thought Conan Doyle, was a habit of dragging the bat across the surface of the pitch as he played forward, presumably acquired in days when the ball was as likely to shoot along the ground as to bounce. Edward Lyttelton, too, remarked on W.G.’s ‘unique play of the shooter’ in this case the one aimed at leg stump: ‘He brought down the bat with a curious dig, at such an angle that it not only went forcibly towards mid-on, but he positively placed it on each side of the field as he chose.’
Conan Doyle thought his greatest strength was his mastery of off-side play. Facing that most uncontrollable of all balls, the good-length ball outside the off stump, ‘he did not flinch from it as a foe, but rather welcomed it as a friend, and stepping across the wicket while bending his great shoulders he watched it closely as it rose, and patted it with an easy tap through the slips’. Conan Doyle also admired the unflinching manner in which he faced up to the quickest bowling even when approaching the age of sixty. But then he always loved fast bowling. He had no weaknesses of technique or character but if he did have an Achilles’ heel it was thought to be slow bowling. He could play the quick men all day but was more vulnerable when the pace dropped.
Charles Thornton, another Etonian, former captain of Cambridge University and one of the finest hitters the game has ever seen, noted: ‘Slows bothered Grace most.’ Jessop agreed, up to a point: ‘Though slowness of foot did make him appear uncomfortable against leg-breaks, yet he rarely succumbed to them.’ It may have been that he preferred the ball to come on to the bat and was always liable to ‘have a go’ at the slows and thereby be lured into an indiscreet shot. He was once expatiating, perhaps over a drink, one evening on how to hit one lob bowler: ‘The way to play him is to hit him out of the ground,’ he explained. Next morning he was quickly dismissed by his intended victim.
Grace retained masterly footwork until late in his career, when his increasing girth and bulk got the better of it. His nimbleness was all the more remarkable when one remembers that he had massive feet. (One damp morning, he and E.M. walked up and down a sodden Gloucestershire pitch for several hours with the same effect as a heavy roller and enabled the match to start on time.) All the greatest batsmen have had magical footwork; Len Hutton marvelled that Bradman’s tiny feet were ‘like Fred Astaire’s’. But there is a parallel with Grace.
Several of W.G.’s contemporaries commented on his ability and panache as a dancer, remarking how he carried his mighty frame lightly across the floor, and he was always in great demand among the ladies at balls. There is a delightful story of Grace, on one such evening, inviting a younger team-mate to step outside and admire the night sky, which the young man duly did, only to turn around and see Grace waltzing off with his partner. That sort of footwork translated easily to the cricket pitch.
How heavy did he like his bat to be? There is conflicting evidence on this. In his book Cricketing Reminiscences he stated categorically: ‘Personally I play with a bat weighing about 2lb 5oz, which, I think, is heavy enough for anybody.’ But Alfred Lubbock recounted how W.G. boasted of wielding a bat weighing 2lb 9oz, heavier than anyone else’s.
He was once asked how a certain delivery should be played. He thought for a momemt and then replied, ‘I should say you ought to put the bat against the ball.’ Like the greatest athletes, he didn’t really think there was anything very extraordinary about what he did. It was only to ordinary people that it seemed so – and still seems so to this day.
THE BOWLER
As a young man, Grace was a brisk round-arm fast-medium-pacer, whose pace slowed down as his girth expanded. It is often forgotten that he was first selected for the Gentlemen in 1865 as a bowler, and his youthful action was described as attractive and ‘slinging’. He appears to to have been a pretty straightforward sort of bowler who ‘had not then acquired any of his subsequent craftiness with the ball
’. He always had the knack of moving it away from the right-handed bat off the pitch – even in his fast days – which he developed when he reduced his speed. He could also produce the occasional slower ball, with the general idea of tempting the batsman into lofting a catch to long-leg, where Fred Grace, a brilliant fielder, was frequently the grateful recipient. It was a successful gambit, if an expensive one.
W.G. generally bowled from round the wicket, still wearing his red and yellow MCC cap, and his tall bearded figure must have presented a formidable aspect as he raced in to bowl. He tended to move swiftly across to the off side, a manoeuvre which he would not have been allowed to get away with these days for fear of roughing up the wicket, but in the mid- to late-1860s the wickets were so bad that even Grace’s massive boots could not have made them much worse. It also brought him a lot of catches off his own bowling. What struck everybody was that he always bowled a good length; no one could ever recall a long-hop, which speaks of long hours of practice. He was always a perfectionist.
But it is his later style of bowling, adopted in the mid-1870s, that is of more interest. Once he had slowed down, his principal delivery was a gentle leg-break and his continuing success with it baffled most people. He looked utterly innocuous, from close up and from the pavilion, yet he lured batsmen out by the sackful, albeit expensively. Lord Hawke put it thus:
His obstinate persistence in invariably bowling one leg ball in every over must have cost thousands of runs, but when he did get a man caught by his leg-trap his glee was delightful. His bowling looked very easy from the pavilion, but it was a great mistake to underrate its artfulness, for he put just a little more or less work on his ball which was often deceptive.
Gilbert Jessop, who played under Grace for the first five seasons of his first-class career and the last five of W.G.’s, wrote in similar terms: ‘Why such simple-looking, round-arm slow “stuff” should cause any uneasiness except perhaps among the tail-enders must have constantly puzzled thousands of spectators in their day.’ Jessop, of course, refused to allow any bowler to dictate terms to him: he hit them all over the shop, regardless of reputation, but his own explanation was that W.G.’s secret weapon was the top-spinner, which surprised the batsman expecting the leg-break.
E.H.D. Sewell, who played under W.G. for London County Cricket Club when he was well into his fifties, went further: he believed the old man imparted not only top-spin but a sort of googly, that is, he could certainly move the ball into the batsman when he thought it was going the other way, and that while he propelled the ball slowly through the air, it came off the pitch much more quickly than the batsman expected.
W.G. believed that the most dangerous ball was one that broke only a little off the pitch. ‘One of the great mistakes a bowler can make is to break too much,’ he once wrote. ‘If a bowler can only manage to make a ball break about three inches, and to do that quickly and imperceptibly, and at the same time hit the wicket if it gets past the batsman, he has learned the great secret of successful breaking.’
But W.G. thought that there was more to bowling than mere technical mastery. ‘True skill in bowling involves head work – a good bowler bowls with his brain more than his arm … It is by the machinations of the slow bowler who uses his head that batsmen are most frequently tempted into the indiscretions which cost them their wickets.’ This was an accurate description of his own modus operandi.
THE FIELDER
It is rare for a great batsman not to be a fine fielder too. The requirements are the same: a good eye and hands, quick feet, fast reflexes: W.G. had all these in abundance, and consequently was one of the best fielders and catchers of his time. There was a family tradition to keep up: E.M. was acknowledged to be the finest fielder in England, lurking with intent at point, which was also W.G.’s favourite position. Early in his career, while E.M. fielded at point, he would be stationed at mid-off or mid-on where his superb athleticism could be shown to good advantage. Then along came G.F., who was without doubt the best outfielder of his generation, a wonderful sight racing round the boundary to hold on to catches that no one else would have even got close to. When W.G. fielded at point, just as E.M. did, he gave the impression of snatching the ball off the face of the bat, so close did he crouch, the ball disappearing into those huge hands ‘like a pea in a jar’ as one contemporary put it. He took 875 first-class catches and countless others in club cricket.
W.G. had the priceless gifts for the fielder of stamina and concentration – and a keenness that no one could equal, even in his fifties, when his massive bulk made it difficult for him to bend down and reach the ball. But for thirty years he was as dominant in the field as with bat or ball. As a young man he was a magnificent thrower of a cricket ball. In a contest at Eastbourne he threw the ball 122 yards. On another occasion he threw it 109 yards in one direction and 105 the other way. As he aged, he preferred to bowl the ball in from the long field, recalled Lord Harris, who also remembered that he was always on the look-out to catch a batsman out of his ground.
You would see him occasionally face as if about to return the ball to the bowler, and instead send it underarm to the wicket-keeper, but I never saw him get anyone out that way.
He also loved to take the opportunity of keeping wicket and did so once in a Test match at The Oval in 1884. He was credited with five first-class stumpings. His enthusiasm caused the immortal remark to be made: ‘That fellow would like to keep wicket to his own bowling.’
THE CAPTAIN
W.G. was captain more often than not, of Gloucestershire, the Gentlemen, London County, and the United South, although oddly enough he did not captain England until 1888, the year he turned forty. He was a natural, if rather unimaginative, leader, who led from the front, and his very presence in a team was a terrific morale-booster. He knew the value of encouragement. He was very good with young players, with a pat on the back and a gruff ‘well played young ’un’ for anybody who tried, even if he had failed. But he was no tactician. Lord Hawke, who knew a thing or two about captaincy, was dismissive: ‘He was a remarkably good and encouraging judge of the cricket of others but one would scarcely say a good captain. Sometimes he would do strange things when in command.’ He would often appear to have lost all interest in what was going on. Hawke remembered him allowing the same two bowlers to operate at Hastings while the batsmen put on 200 runs.
When it came to setting a field, W.G. took great care when he himself was bowling, but tended to be less bothered when anybody else was. If the bowler had no firm opinions, he would allow the fielders to spread themselves around in the traditional places, for he was no innovator. He did think deeply about the game but he did not react to changes in the game as it developed in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, spearheaded by the Australians, who brought in the notion of different fields for different bowlers. Grace was a traditionalist to the end.
The greatest criticism of him was that he overbowled himself, and there is little doubt that the accusation was justified. ‘His little weakness was a desire to be always bowling,’ was how Lord Hawke put it. He just could not bear to be out of the game, and could rarely accept that anybody else might be more capable of breaking a big partnership. Gilbert Jessop, for one, considered the criticism unfair: ‘Though he loved bowling himself, it was very difficult in my time to get him to bowl enough,’ he wrote, but that was towards the end of W.G.’s career – and Jessop was a very charitable man.
9 · DR GRACE
ON 27 October 1868, W.G. Grace was admitted to Bristol Medical School, continuing in the footsteps of his father and three older brothers. He must have been an awe-inspiring figure to his young contemporaries, for as a 1917 history of Bristol Royal Infirmary put it, ‘he was in his twenty-first year and was already one of the most famous men in England’. However, he probably inspired less awe among his teachers. Students were required to pursue their studies for four years before presenting themselves for their final examination. It took W.G. more than a decade, consta
ntly interrupted by the demands of his cricketing career, to qualify as a doctor. In the jargon of the era, he was a ‘chronic’, a permanent student, and the seemingly endless nature of his studies gave rise to a great deal of amused comment in the cricket world.
His time at the BMS coincided with a turbulent period in the institution’s history. It came into being in 1826, the brainchild of an inspirational doctor named Henry Clark, who made space in his own home in King Square for lecture and demonstration rooms. It was given official recognition in 1828 and opened fully in 1833.
Some distinguished figures, and one or two eccentric ones, graced its staff. Among the former was William Budd, a pioneer of epidemiology and the first man to realise that tuberculosis was spread by microbes, a notion that he said suddenly occurred to him one morning as he walked on Durdham Down, where Henry Grace senior, a friend of his, had once practised cricket with his fellow medical students.
Among the eccentrics was Samuel Rootsey, a botany lecturer in the 1840s and 1850s, who had a chemist’s shop in the city but preferred to wander the countryside studying rocks and plants and was several times imprisoned for debt. Undaunted by his own pecuniary problems, he confided in one prison visitor his plan for paying off the national debt – it involved planting the ocean with floating seaweed on which corn and other crops could be harvested. His lectures were notorious for their disorderliness because he was inclined to wander off the subject at the least excuse. Nor was erratic behaviour confined to the lecture halls. A surgeon at the Bristol Royal Infirmary in the 1850s and 1860s he once inflicted such a severe injury to his own nose with a long knife used for amputations, as he drew it back prior to use, that he required emergency treatment from his colleagues before he could proceed with the operation.