by Low, Robert
At lunch, the president of the club, Mr A.D. Madden, toasted the tourists and their captain. Grace responded and took the opportunity to mention that it had been decided to restrict the match to one innings per side. One reporter noted: ‘His hazel eye seemed to have a merrier look than usual, when he made this statement, as if he appeared to know that the South were in for a leather-hunting.’ So it transpired. Against a weak attack the English batsmen took the opportunity, in the modern idiom, to fill their boots, amassing 438. Grace batted at seven and weighed in with a fine, though not chanceless, 69, top score and one of five half-centuries. South Australia managed to salvage a draw with an unimpressive 102–8. Grace took 1–17 but had a splendid day with the ball in the next fixture, a one-day match against a Williamstown XXII. Rain constantly affected the proceedings, but W.G. still helped himself to 11–58 as the locals were dismissed for 154. The rain restricted Lord Sheffield’s XII to 43–1 and the match was drawn.
Grace nearly bagged a pair against a Melbourne Junior XX. In the first innings he was bowled for one and in the second contrived to run himself out for a duck. These minor matches were no preparation for the second Test, in Sydney, at the beginning of February. Indeed, they may have contributed to a false sense of superiority over the Australians. A commentator in the Australasian put it bluntly:
After winning their opening matches against South Australia and Victoria, the Englishmen had rather a poor opinion of Australian cricket, and one or two who rode the high horse expressed regret that there was no eleven in the colonies which could put them to their best. Since that time they have had reason to change their opinions.
W.G. was involved in controversy before the second Test got under way. The brilliant Australian left-handed batsman Harry Moses had picked up a bad leg injury in the first Test but was picked for the second although he was clearly not fit. W.G. was determined to square the series and warned Moses that, as a doctor, he considered his injury was too serious to allow him to play. Consequently, if he went ahead, he should not expect England to allow him a substitute in the field if he broke down. Moses tested the leg and said he was fit enough to play although many people thought twelfth man Syd Gregory should have been picked instead. They turned out to be right.
Australia won the toss and on a good wicket and in perfect weather made only 145. Lohmann was the hero for England with the excellent figures of 8–58. During his innings of 29 Moses aggravated the injury and his doctor warned him that he risked permanent injury if he fielded. But after W.G.’s pre-match warning, Blackham felt he could not ask for a substitute and poor Moses had to limp around the field, barely able to walk. The crowd protested loudly about his being forced to field, blaming Grace for it. It did not affect him in the slightest; perhaps it even encouraged him. At the close, England were 38–1 with W.G. going well.
Having made his point, next morning Grace offered Blackham a substitute after all. As a medical man, it could have given him no pleasure to see Moses struggling to walk. Blackham asked if Gregory could be substitute. As Gregory was a brilliant fielder, Grace refused the request. Eventually, they agreed on the veteran Tom Garrett. W.G. was not rewarded for his generosity when he resumed his innings. As it was Saturday, twenty thousand people had packed into the ground and they were soon celebrating the wicket they most wanted. Grace was not at his most fluent, and appeared to be cramped by the Australian tactic of posting Bruce at silly point, very close to the bat. The score had just reached 50 when he was bowled neck and crop by a beauty from his old adversary Turner for 26.
Unlike in the first Test, the English batting did not fold after his departure. His opening partner Abel carried his bat for a superb 132 and the team mustered a respectable 306 for a first-innings lead of 162. This was widely thought to be a match-winning advantage, especially when Trott was dismissed for 1 before the close. With Moses injured, Australia were effectively two wickets down – but when play resumed on Monday the crowd witnessed one of the great fightbacks in cricket history. They also gave Grace the bird again. A Sydney newspaper, the Daily Telegraph, had published what purported to be a letter written by him after his trip to Australia eighteen years previously, in which he was highly critical of the country and its people.
I must admit that our gentlemen players had a very scrubby fag end, but after all, we pulled through respectably, and I have the money, which is the only thing I wanted, for to tell you the truth, I care so little for colonial opinion that you may publish this letter if you like, it will show the cads what I think of them. A good deal was said about my stopping away from the lunch at various places. My reason was that I didn’t want to fraternise with the tinkers, tailors and snobs who are the great guns of your cricket world. To take their money was a fair thing in return for work done, but to hobnob with a lot of scum was a far different thing. Fancy the chance of a greasy butcher on his travels walking up to me one day at Lord’s with ‘How d’ye do, Mr G.; I lunched with you in Australia’. My dear fellow, as far as I can see, colonial society is low, shockingly low. You have plenty of money, no doubt, but your gentlemen are yet unborn. I suppose including yourself, I met about three during the whole of my trip.
It was a hoax, written by one Richard Egan Lee, who had since died. It is difficult to see how anybody could have mistaken its coarse pastiche of an upper-class Englishman’s voice for Grace’s down-to-earth manner. The idea that he would have used a phrase like ‘it will show the cads what I think of them’ was laughable, but it appears to have convinced plenty in the Sydney crowd that it was genuine, and as a result they hurled abuse at W.G. He was so angry that he demanded that a retraction be printed, and this appeared the day after the Test finished.
He must have felt equally ill-disposed towards the Australian batsmen Lyons and Bannerman. In their contrasting style – Lyons aggressive, Bannerman the arch-stonewaller – they put on 174, a stand which turned the match. It was Grace who gave Bannerman the most difficulty with what one reporter described as his ‘hanging slow balls’, but Lyons showed him less respect, depositing one inviting delivery in the drainage ditch for ‘a fiver’. Grace eventually caught him at point off Lohmann, but by then he had scored 134. By the end of the day Australia were 101 ahead with plenty of wickets in hand.
Overnight the Australians suffered a fresh setback, to add to Moses’s injury. A telegram from Melbourne announced that the bowler Charie McLeod’s brother had died suddenly, aged only thirty-five. McLeod asked his team-mates what he should do. With typical Australian pragmatism, they pointed out that the next express train to Melbourne did not leave until the afternoon so he might as well bat (he made 18, highly creditable in the circumstances). There was a sequel, inevitably involving Grace. Australia made 391, setting England 229 to win. Blackham asked if a Melbourne University player named Hutton might substitute in the field for McLeod.
‘Is he a better field than McLeod?’ asked Grace, unimpressed by the tragic nature of McLeod’s departure.
‘Yes,’ replied Blackham, with irreproachable honesty.
‘Then get someone else,’ declared Grace.
England never recovered from a dreadful start. The first two wickets, those of Abel and Bean, went down with only 6 on the board. Joined at the wicket by Stoddart, W.G. might have played cautiously to rebuild the innings. Instead, he went recklessly on to the attack. He leapt out and drove the ball straight back down the wicket like a bullet, but the bowler, Giffen, failed to hold on to the stinging chance. Grace cut the next ball beautifully for four, then slashed at Turner and was caught behind by Blackham. The whole Australian team leapt into the air to appeal, the umpire’s finger went up and Grace was on his way. England were 11–3 and pandemonium followed. ‘The air was thick with hats, and rent with shouting. Such a scene has, perhaps, never been witnessed on the ground before as followed the downfall of the English captain,’ reported the Australasian. Rain spared England further humiliation that day but on the next Australia duly completed victory by 73 runs, despite Stoddart
’s fighting 69, and assured themselves of the three-match rubber. The result of the third and last Test, at Adelaide, was rendered a formality. It was an outcome few, not least in Australia, had anticipated at the start of the series.
Grace himself appears to have been so upset at this unexpected turn of events that he behaved badly for the rest of the team’s stay in Australia, his disgruntlement taking the form of persistent disputes with umpires. After a series of upcountry matches, England returned to Sydney for the return against New South Wales, beating them comfortably by seven wickets.
The match was notable for the reappearance after several seasons in retirement of the great Percy McDonnell, former captain of Australia. He had turned down many previous entreaties to come back by the NSW selectors but meeting his old adversary W.G. again for a chat before the game persuaded him to change his mind. England amassed 414 in their first innings, Grace racing to a quickfire 45 out of 52, before playing on to Callaway. Read and Lohmann scored centuries. NSW replied with 244 (Grace 3–66) and were obliged to follow on. In their second innings they made 210 (Grace 2–29), setting England only 41 to win. Alas, opening the NSW innings each time, McDonnell made only 5 and 2.
Apart from his comeback, the main talking point was W.G.’s behaviour towards one of the umpires, Briscoe, after he turned down an appeal for a catch at the wicket in NSW’s first innings. According to the umpire, a furious Grace roared: ‘If we have such umpires as you we may as well go back to England.’ W.G. declared that he had merely said: ‘I wish you would pay attention to the game. We all heard the catch.’ Even at this distance, that sounds just as insulting as the first version, and Briscoe could hardly be blamed for refusing to stand in NSW’s second innings. There was a long delay while a replacement was sought. Finally, Charlie Bannerman, the former Test batsman, agreed to take over and the match could be resumed. But the incident did nothing to raise Grace’s stature with the Australian public.
A two-day match against a Wollongong (NSW) XXII, ruined by rain (Grace was out for 6) was followed by a trip to Tasmania, which so captivated Lord Sheffield that there was talk that he intended to make the island his winter home. The party returned to Melbourne for the penultimate match of the tour, the return against Victoria. It was a lacklustre affair, the Victorians (137 and 100) proving unable to cope with the English batsmen, with the exception of the Test player William Bruce, who scored a half century in each innings. Grace (44) top-scored in England’s first-innings total of 184 and did not bother to bat in the second when they knocked off the runs for the loss of only one wicket.
On the party went to Adelaide for the final match of their gruelling 27-match itinerary. Only two matches had been lost, but unfortunately they were both Tests, and that was how the tour would be remembered, certainly by Grace himself. The loss of the second Test, and with it the rubber, seems to have soured Grace for the rest of the time he was in Australia. ‘Grace is admittedly a bad loser,’ wrote Tom Horan, ‘and when he lost two of the test matches in succession he lost his temper too, and kept on losing it right to the finish … Since that match Grace seems to have developed a condition of captiousness, fussiness and nastiness strongly to be deprecated.’ These were strong words indeed from Australia’s most distinguished and respected commentator, who bent over backwards to be fair to all sides.
The series may have gone but there was a lot of pride at stake at Adelaide for England: a 3–0 whitewash would be the most humiliating farewell imaginable after the high hopes, not to say arrogance, of the first weeks of the tour. The third Test saw Grace at his best as a batsman and his worst as a captain. The Australians had named Flynn, one of their most respected umpires, to stand in the game. To everyone’s surprise Grace objected and would not budge. The Australians were outraged. ‘His objection to Flynn was nothing short of a gratuitous insult to a first-class umpire,’ wrote Horan, who also pointed out that when touring England the Australians were not allowed to object to any home umpires ‘no matter how incompetent’. Ravish and Whitridge were the eventual choices; then Ravish had to stand down just before the match through illness, to be replaced by Downs.
This was not Grace’s only grouse before a ball had been bowled. He boycotted an official function. He wanted the ends of the Adelaide Oval to be roped off, to reduce the length of the boundaries, but was overruled. He didn’t like the fact that the pitch was covered until the first day of the match, but was ignored. At the toss, when Blackham produced his lucky coin, Grace would not let him toss but insisted on doing so himself while the Australian skipper called. He called ‘tails’ and lost, to Grace’s great pleasure. It was a good toss to win for the pitch, laid on clay, was in magnificent condition, hard and true, and so shiny that at first the bowlers found it hard to stay upright.
Grace and Abel opened the batting and put on 47 without trouble, Grace hitting Trott for three boundaries in his first over when he came on as first change. Though he lost Abel, stumped for 24, Grace and Stoddart went in to lunch at 65–1. Afterwards Grace continued in highly aggressive fashion, jumping down the wicket at almost every delivery and lofting the ball in to the outfield, but out of reach of the fielders. Soon after he had reached his half-century, however, he was out trying to smite a yorker from McLeod. He had hit eight fours in his 58 and walked off to a great ovation. This time England did not fold after the departure of their greatest batsman but, by the time rain curtailed play on the afternoon of the second day, had gone on to rack up a remorseless 490–9, Stoddart compiling a dashing 134, Peel made 83 and Read 57. MacGregor and Attewell rubbed salt in the wound by putting on 65 for the last wicket in steadily increasing rain.
Indeed, the rain became so heavy that the Australians appealed to the umpires several times for play to be suspended. It was only when the English players joined in that Whitridge and Downs agreed. By then the players were soaked to the skin, and it was evident that the Australians would be batting on a much stickier wicket than their fortunate opponents.
More controversy ensued on the third day, a Saturday. The rain poured down all night on the uncovered pitch, leaving it a sodden mess on which it would be almost impossible to score runs. The English were looking to get among the Australian batsmen once their own innings had been wound up, and were not at all pleased to hear that the umpires, having inspected the wicket, decreed that the start of play should be delayed for an hour.
W.G. was outraged. He marched into the Australian dressing-room and demanded that Blackham accompany him out to the wicket so that they, and not the umpires, should decide whether play should begin. Blackham declined, and Grace departed in high dudgeon, threatening to pull his team out of the match if he did not get his way. ‘Who told the umpires to inspect the wicket? I didn’t,’ was his parting shot. ‘Disagreeable insinuations were made by Grace and a couple of the [English] professionals,’ wrote the Australasian’s reporter. These were apparently to the effect that the umpires had bowed to Australian pressure in taking their decision.
The Australians denied this, saying the Blackham in fact went out of his way to avoid talking to the umpires. Grace later claimed he had meant that pressure had been exerted from people who had been betting on the match and not by the Australian players, but the damage was done. In the Australian view, Grace had hoist himself with his own petard by making such a fuss about the umpires before the match started. Having successfully objected to Flynn, he could hardly complain about the decisions of the pair who eventually stood. All he succeeded in doing was in insisting that they inspect the wicket every quarter of an hour.
When tempers cooled and play resumed, MacGregor and Attewell put on a further 9 to take their stand to 74 before MacGregor was given run out going for the single which would have taken the score to 500. As it was, England’s 499 was their highest Test score against Australia until then.
As they feared, the Australians could not cope with the conditions and were shot out for 100 and 169, to lose by an innings and 230 runs, their heaviest defeat. On Sat
urday, the crowd showed what it thought of Grace’s conduct by subjecting him to mock applause whenever he touched the ball. ‘It was made abundantly clear that Grace is by no means as popular with Australian crowds as he was at the commencement of the tour,’ commented the Australasian.
England wrapped up the match on the fourth day, Monday, leaving them a day’s rest before they sailed for home on the Wednesday.
Although he ended the tour under a cloud, there was no doubt that from a playing point of view it had been a success for W.G. He topped the tour party averages in eleven-a-side matches, with eleven innings (once not out), an aggregate of 448 and an average of 44.80. (Abel was second with 38.80, while Stoddart scored two more runs – 450 – but averaged 37.50.) He was also top of the averages with the following figures: innings: 31; runs: 921; highest score 159 not out; not out: 3: average 32.89. It was a tremendous achievement, which surprised and impressed informed Australian observers. When he first toured Australia in his prime twenty years earlier he had averaged 35.11 in all matches, admittedly on far worse wickets. Still, it was evident that he had maintained an extraordinarily high batting standard for a man of forty-three.
The same could not be said for his bowling. He bowled little in eleven-a-side matches, taking only five wickets at 26.80. He fared better in the other matches, against primitive batting, with a haul of forty-eight wickets at only 9.52. As for his fielding, the Australasian’s tour summary commented: ‘W.G. Grace, despite his weight and stomach, acquitted himself creditably at point, and accepted more than one hot chance.’