by Low, Robert
As angry as the rest of the Essex team, Kortright now bowled as fast as he had ever done. With Gloucestershire on 96–3, he reached within himself for one more lethal salvo. First, he trapped W.G. plumb lbw, but the umpire, presumably totally cowed by now, declined to give it. Grace edged the next one to give a catch behind, but again the umpire was the only other man on the field not to see or hear it. Infuriated, Kortright pounded in and produced an unplayable ball which knocked two of Grace’s stumps out of the ground, one of them cartwheeling through the air and landing yards away. W.G. was one short of his half-century. As he slowly turned to leave the crease, the triumphant Kortright approached and remarked: ‘Surely you’re not going, Doctor – there’s still one stump standing.’
W.G. walked off in high dudgeon, telling one and all he had never been so insulted. There was plenty more drama to come. Gloucestershire inched towards the target, but steadily lost wickets. With two runs needed, the ninth wicket went down, leaving only the old professional, Fred Roberts, a fine bowler but total rabbit with the bat, and Kortright rampant. Determined to win, W.G. instructed Roberts he was not to move his bat or run away.
‘But what about my wife and family, Doctor?’ Roberts is said to have asked.
‘Oh, they’ll be all right,’ remarked W.G. ‘Kortright may hit you but he can’t kill you and if we win, there’ll be an extra £1 for you. But if you get out, you’ll never play for Gloucestershire again.’
This dire warning did the trick. Gloucestershire scraped home by one wicket, Jessop hitting Kortright for four to seal the narrowest of victories. This may have been the last straw for Kortright, who was so incensed by Grace’s behaviour that it was only the intervention of the Essex and former England amateur ‘Bunny’ Lucas that persuaded him grudgingly to accept his invitation to appear for the Gentlemen in Grace’s Jubilee Match. He was ever afterwards glad that he did.
There were still eight days to go before the great day, but W.G. had no thought of conserving his energy. He played cricket on six of them, first against Warwickshire (at Birmingham), against whom he made 24 and took 2–27 and 4–46, then against Somerset (at Bristol), maintaining his good form with a twelve-wicket haul (7–85 and 5–53) to add to 20 with the bat.
There was huge public expectation in the days before the Jubilee Match, stoked by long articles and profiles about Grace in the sporting newspapers. On the morning of Monday 18 July a large crowd started gathering at Lord’s well before the gates were due to open at 10.30 a.m.(the match was to start at noon). Gloucestershire supporters were not to be left out. Hundreds came up from the West Country, on special excursion trains laid on for the occasion. As the crowd poured into the ground, it soon became apparent that there would not be room for all in the stands and seats, and it was decided to allow the overspill on to the grass all around the ground. The official paying attendance figure was 17,423, so at least 20,000 were estimated to be crammed into the ground for this historic day.
W.G., with his wife and daughter, Bessie, arrived just before eleven o’clock and found extreme difficulty in getting through the crush, as everyone wanted to shake his hand. Inside the ground, there were hundreds of congratulatory telegrams for him.
It was a beautiful day, the wicket hard and true, and no surprise that Shrewsbury elected to bat. Unless Kortright ran through the professionals within the day, the crowd would have to be satisfied with seeing Grace in the field but not at the crease on his birthday.
Just after the ground clock had struck twelve, W.G. emerged from the pavilion. His descent of the stairs took some time, as so many members wanted to shake him by the hand, but when he finally stepped out on to the grass, wearing his familiar red and yellow striped cap, he received a tremendous ovation; his team followed at a decent distance to allow him to savour this great moment. It was an incredible thirty-three years since he first walked out for the Gentlemen at Lord’s – but it was a very different figure who now made his way to the middle: the lithe young athlete with the dark beard had given way to a ponderous, stooping, twenty-stone colossus with an impressive girth, whose beard had long turned grey. He still fielded at point but now had difficulty in reaching down for the ball, although his huge hands were still as safe as ever when anything catchable came straight at him. On this day, too, he was hampered by a bruised heel, which soon obliged him to return briefly to the pavilion for treatment.
He and Kortright were still not on speaking terms, but the Essex man did as he was told and bowled a terrifyingly quick spell, without any luck, to get the match off to a flying start. Grace was at first cheered whenever the ball went to him in the field, and delighted the crowd when he brought himself back on for his second spell with the ball and induced ‘Long John’ Tunnicliffe to edge a catch to Gregor MacGregor behind the stumps.
But the day was something of an anticlimax, after the torrent of publicity beforehand. Scoring was slow, prompting one observer to remark that ‘many of the batsmen seemed to be overweighted by the sense of their responsibility’. Grace’s limelight was rather stolen by one of his oldest adversaries, Billy Gunn, who compiled a patient 139, a record for a professional in this fixture at Lord’s, but W.G. led the applause when he reached his century.
A brief piece of newsreel footage survives to commemorate the great day. Wearing a dark-striped blazer over his white flannels, his MCC cap perched on his massive head, W.G. strolls towards camera behind one of the stands, dwarfing Arthur Shrewsbury, captain of the Players, beside him. As they pass the cameraman, W.G. grins and genially raises his cap before passing out of shot. Behind them come the rest of the players in a sort of crocodile, many of them smoking pipes or cigarettes (perhaps they have just emerged from lunch). Behind them straggle a crowd of men, dressed very formally, wearing top hats, bowlers or boaters, and a few boys in Eton jackets. There is just one woman in a white hat and long white dress.
It was a historic day in more than one sense. Shortly after lunch, W.G. left the field again, not from a recurrence of his injury, but to attend a meeting of representatives from all the counties, under the chairmanship of the President of the MCC, the Hon Alfred Lyttelton, MP (and former England wicket-keeper, whom W.G. had replaced behind the stumps in the Oval Test of 1884). The meeting voted to set up a new body to control Test matches in England, later to be called the Board of Control.
At 6.30 p.m., with the Players on 328–9, W.G. led his men off the field, to the total surprise of everyone else, as play was supposed to finish at 7 p.m. No one objected. That evening, the MCC held a banquet in his honour in the pavilion.
On Tuesday morning the Players were soon dismissed for 335, the pick of the bowlers being W.G.’s protégé Charles Townsend, with 4–58. Grace himself took 1–34 off 12 five-ball overs. Then came the moment another huge crowd had come to see: the fifty-year-old Champion emerging from the pavilion to open the innings, in tandem with his old accomplice Stoddart. But there was no gentle full toss or long-hop to get him off the mark, even from that model professional and sportsman, Jack Hearne, the Middlesex and England medium-pacer then at the height of his career. Instead, W.G. scratched around, was twice beaten and barely survived the first over. With barely a run scored, he was dropped twice, by Lilley behind the stumps and by Hearne off his own bowling, to the crowd’s great relief. Clearly troubled by his bad heel, he looked every year of his age.
A few more aggressive blows got him going at last but it was always hard graft, and he was further inconvenienced by a delivery from Haigh which reared up and struck him painfully on the left hand. Still, he and Stoddart completed the 50 partnership before the Middlesex man was out for 21. With the score on 79, Lilley made amends for his earlier drop by holding on to an edge off Lockwood and W.G. was gone for 43. It was enough to satisfy the crowd, who gave him a great hand as he limped benignly off.
Helped by a fighting 50 from Archie MacLaren, the Gentlemen got to 303, only 32 behind, and then reduced the Players to 42–2 by the close, thanks largely to another wicked sessio
n from Kortright, bowling flat out in the gathering gloom: he knocked Bobby Abel’s leg stump out of the ground and Bill Storer’s bat out of his hands three times in ten minutes. Everything pointed to an exciting final day’s play.
For the second consecutive evening, W.G. was honoured with a dinner, this time at the Sports Club in St James’s Square, attended by 150 cricket dignitaries, with the Attorney-General, and President of Surrey, Sir Richard Webster, QC, MP, in the chair. W.G. was flanked by his contemporaries, Sammy Woods and Archie MacLaren to his right, Stoddart, MacGregor, Jack Mason and Kortright, swallowing his pride, to his left. Webster ran through the guest of honour’s career, telling a few of the old chestnuts along the way. There was no man in England, he observed, whose doings were more closely watched than Grace’s. Why, only the previous evening in the Commons, Mr A.J. Balfour, speaking from the Treasury Bench, had proudly mentioned that he was the same age as ‘the champion’. He ended with the hope that ‘in days to come … W.G., from his fireside, would be able to contemplate with satisfaction his cricket days, in which he has not thought of himself, but set an example, and would die as he had lived, admired of the British nation as a straightforward type of an Englishman.’
If W.G. found this a touch morbid, he kept the thought to himself and responded in his familiar style, at once shy and humble, gruff and amusing. ‘I wish I had Stoddart’s happy knack of saying the right words in the right place’ he said, but he managed it, none the less, without the distraction of notes. He went on: ‘If I cannot say the right words, I feel them’ and never said a truer word.
One delightful anecdote typified his style:
Sir Richard Webster said I was always very good to young players. Well, I remember, many years ago, when I was playing for MCC against Surrey at Lord’s, they brought up an unfortunate colt who had taken a few wickets in a match the week before. He bowled one over. The first ball I played back quietly to him. The next went into the garden, down by the old armoury. The third followed suit, and the fourth and fifth went into the pavilion. They never bowled that poor fellow again. If you call that giving advice to a young cricketer, well …
The rest of the sentence was drowned by laughter from his fellow diners.
It was overcast and chilly when the Gentlemen walked out on to the field to start the third and final day, minus Grace, whose left hand and heel were both troubling him. There were fewer spectators than on the first two days, but the crowd was still respectable enough and grew through the day to around twelve thousand (compared with more than seventeen thousand on the Monday).
Kortwright, Sammy Woods and Jack Mason could not break through as they had the previous evening, Shrewsbury decided against a sporting declaration, and the Players were eventually all out for 263. That left the Gentlemen a target of 296 in 150 minutes, so a draw looked odds-on.
To general disappointment, Grace did not open the innings, nor did he appear even though wickets started to tumble, and the rumour spread around the ground that he would be unable to bat because of his bruised hand. When the seventh wicket went down with only 77 runs on the board, the Gentlemen were staring ignominious defeat in the face, for there were still fifty-five minutes to go until the officially advertised finishing time of 6.30 p.m. However painful his ageing limbs were, this was not the moment for Grace to duck a challenge, and his familiar figure appeared on the pavilion steps, to a great ovation. Before another run had been scored, the batsman at the other end, Johnny Dixon, was on his way, swiftly followed by MacGregor, leaving the lame and sore Grace at the wicket and only – of all people – Kortright to bat. Fortunately, he and W.G. had by then patched up their differences; indeed Grace had referred jocularly to ‘my friend Kortright’ in his speech the previous evening.
‘Korty, don’t be nervous, play your usual game,’ advised Grace as their paths crossed.
‘All right, Doc, I’ll do my best,’ replied the volatile fast bowler, and he proceeded to do so, striking the ball cleanly around Lord’s while Grace, restricted by his hand injury, played more defensively. As the minutes ticked away, the crowd became more and more excited. ‘There was no getting away from the fact that the sympathies of the vast throng were on the side of the batsmen,’ as one report had it. Certain defeat might yet be avoided – and looked to have been when Kortwright survived what was generally assumed to be the last over, of Storer’s very occasional leg-spin. A pitch invasion from the jubilant spectators looked a certainty as, with the score on 130–9, Kortright headed triumphantly for the pavilion, only to be waved back. Like almost everyone else on the ground, he was unaware that Grace and Shrewsbury had earlier in the day agreed to play an extra half-hour, until 7 p.m., if either side was in a position to win at 6.30 p.m. Grace had somehow managed not to inform Kortright of the new plan while they were together at the wicket.
However, Kortright settled down again, and played as calmly as before. Shrewsbury kept trying new bowlers, but to no avail, and the tension mounted again. With only four minutes left, Shrewsbury tried one last gamble, bringing his opening bowler Lockwood on from the Pavilion End.
Kortright had made 46, and perhaps the thought that he might reach his half-century as well as save the match was his undoing. He drove at Lockwood’s third ball, but instead of despatching it to the boundary succeeded only in skying it high on the off side for Haigh to pocket the catch, running back. All out for 158, the Players had lost by 137. The last-wicket pair had put on 78 and W.G. was left on 31 not out. He walked slowly back to the pavilion, arm-in-arm with Kortright, their feud finally at an end, as the crowd surged around them, slapping them on the back. They would not disperse from in front of the pavilion until W.G. and Kortright appeared on the players’ balcony to acknowledge their cheers. Certainly, the Press was ecstatic. ‘By general consent the match was one of the best ever seen at Lord’s,’ said the Daily Telegraph. As a Victorian melodrama, it could hardly have been bettered.
After such an exciting game, two late nights and his injuries, Grace could have been forgiven for wanting a long rest. Nothing gives a better idea of his extraordinary stamina and continuing enthusiasm for the game than the fact that the very next morning he turned out at Trent Bridge to open the batting for Goucestershire – and finished the day on 143 not out, although he could barely walk (he was eventually dismissed next day for 168 out of a total of 307). His appearance attracted a larger crowd than usual to the ground on which he had first played nearly a quarter of a century previously. It was he, of course, who had scored the first first-class century there, and his latest display, and his after-dinner speech during the Lord’s match, provoked yet another poem in his honour, entitled ‘The Lay of the Oldest Cricketer’:
The day was long, the air was warm
The Doctor was in splendid form;
’Twas like his cheek, the Notts men say,
To keep them in the field all day;
The bat, with which he made his score
To them seemed wider than a door.
Most ancient of all players he,
The fifty-year-old ‘W.G.’
Ah, well a day! the times are gone
When he but weighed a dozen stone;
But still from morning’s light till dark
He carols like the blithesome lark.
At Sports Club, courted and caressed,
High placed in hall, a welcome guest,
He boldly stepped into the breach,
With unpremeditated speech.
Old times are changed, old manners gone,
But Dr William still keeps on;
The youngsters of these modern days
Look on with rapture when he plays.
A wondrous batsman, calm and cool,
Admired by dukes and boys at school,
While earls and peasants in the ring
Applaud him as they would a king.
Gloucestershire experienced a welcome revival in 1898, to finish third in the county table behind Yorkshire and Middlesex. W.G. made one more
century for them, 109 against Somerset at Taunton. What neither he nor anybody realised at the time was that his fifty-first hundred for Gloucestershire would also be his last for the county of his birth.
Sussex would have been the recipients of that award, had not Grace suddenly declared Gloucestershire’s innings closed when he was 93 and looking certain for a century. The reason was that, until then, 93 was the only score under 100 he had not made in first-class cricket. He was well aware that his great career had almost gone full circle, and wanted to tie up the loose ends. This unique deed shows that he was, in his way, as obsessed with statistics as most cricket lovers, whether active or passive. The difference with the rest of them is that he was in a position to do something about his own.
W.G. may have been honoured and feted by the cricket world in his Jubilee year but no official recognition came his way, despite the Prince of Wales’s admiration. The obvious acknowledgement would have been a knighthood, which would surely have been forthcoming in modern times. The explanation is probably that sportsmen were not regarded as serious people, and certainly not by Queen Victoria. If any sovereign were to honour W.G. it would have been the sporting figure of Edward VII, who came to the throne in 1901, but the call from the palace never came. Lord Hawke regarded it as a surprising omission on the government’s part, particularly when such an influential Cabinet Minister as A.J. Balfour was frequently in attendance at Lord’s and indeed became Prime Minister in 1902. W.G. had to rest content with the undying affection of the common people.