Читать книгу WG Grace - Robert Low - Страница 10

1854–1869

WHAT was the state of cricket in England when Gilbert Grace was a boy in Downend? In the 1850s it was at a crossroads, in between its birth in the previous century as a village game and its development as a national sport in the second half of the nineteenth century, with the county championship at its apex. Several county clubs had been set up (the first was Sussex in 1841) and an informal championship began in 1864. This left large areas of the country where the only cricket was played between village teams such as Dr Grace had set up in Gloucestershire, but there was a growing number of good professionals whom the public were keen to see. In the absence of a proper county championship, how were they to do so? The answer came in the form of touring troupes of the top professionals, of which the first and most notable was the All England Eleven set up by William Clarke in 1846.

It is fitting that W.G.’s first experience of cricket outside the charmed world of The Chestnuts was in 1854, when he was six years old. He was taken to Bristol to see a match between Clarke’s All England team and twenty-two men of West Gloucestershire. The game was organised by his father, who also captained the local team. So the first match seen by the boy who was to be the century’s greatest cricketer involved the man who was the century’s most innovative cricketer until that point.

William Clarke was as significant a figure in his day as Kerry Packer was in ours and with much the same aim: to capitalise on the growing public interest in the game and establish regular employment and a decent market rate for professional cricketers, whose job prospects had hitherto been precarious. The means Clarke devised to do this was to recruit the best cricketers in the country for All England and tour the country playing any local teams who cared to arrange a venue.

A Nottingham man, Clarke was first a bricklayer and then an innkeeper. He first played cricket for the Notts Eleven at the age of eighteen and became well known in the North and Midlands as a slow bowler who delivered leg-breaks from waist height. He had a shrewd eye for business, for a good horse and a good deal: he married the widow of the proprietor of the Trent Bridge Inn and laid the foundations of the Trent Bridge ground by buying and developing the adjoining land. He was a late developer on the national cricket scene: his first appearance at Lord’s, for the North v the South, was in 1836 when he was thirty-seven. Ten years later, he was invited by the Marylebone Cricket Club to come to London as a practice bowler at Lord’s. That year he made a belated debut for the Players v Gentlemen (in which he was to play several more times) and in the 1847 fixture he shared all twenty wickets with John Lillywhite, both matches being played at Lords.

By then, Clarke, ever on the look-out for a good business opportunity, had set up his All England Eleven. As he had predicted, it was a huge success. Invitations came in from all over the country and Clarke’s circus took the cricketing message to places until then starved of top-class cricket, going to remote spots as far afield as Cornwall, Lincolnshire and Ireland, travelling long hours in the most uncomfortable circumstances, by stagecoach if there was no railway line.

The welcome they received everywhere more than made up for the hardship involved. The financial rewards did not, however, and in 1852 several of his professionals departed to set up a rival team, the United All England Eleven, in protest at Clarke’s refusal to pay them a decent wage. Local clubs were required to put up a fee of about £70, yet Clarke, who had a reputation for tight-fistedness, paid his players only £5 each (or a grudging £6 for long journeys) from which he deducted their travelling expenses.

He retained the loyalty of most of his players, however, and for the visit to Bristol he could still muster a formidable Eleven, including some of the greatest names in English cricket: George Parr, ‘the Lion of the North’, another Nottinghamshire man, gritty and determined, a natural leader who took over the All England team from Clarke and led two of the first three overseas tours by English teams; Julius Caesar, whose magnificent name belied both his origins (he came from Goldalming, in rural Surrey), his small stature and his intensely nervous nature, but who was a fine batsman, a great exponent of the drive and the pull; the durable and evergreen Sussex wicketkeeper Thomas Box; William Caffyn, also of Surrey, a talented all-rounder known at The Oval as ‘Terrible Billy’; John Bickley, the Nottinghamshire medium-pace bowler who the previous year had taken 8–23 against England at Lord’s; Edgar ‘Ned’ Willsher, the Kent left-arm opening bowler who eight years later was to write his name in cricket history by being no-balled by John Lillywhite for overarm bowling, which led to its legalisation; and there was Clarke himself, at fifty-six nearing the end of his long career, and his son, Alfred, a capable enough batsman. So superior in ability were Clarke’s men to the local amateurs that they were quite happy to play teams of eighteen or twenty-two, and generally beat them. A visit from Clarke’s Eleven was a great social occasion, eagerly anticipated for months beforehand by a public with an appetite for good cricket that had never previously been served. Special entertainments were devised for the evenings to keep the spectators amused.

The players wore spotted or striped shirts, ties or scarves, white trousers held up with thick belts and round bowler-style hats. They bowled four-ball overs in the round-arm style which had gradually developed in the first half of the century despite fierce opposition from defenders of the old underarm fashion and was legalised in 1835 (it was not until 1864 that the MCC finally sanctioned fully overarm bowling). Scores were usually low by modern standards, for batting was often a slow and laborious process largely because pitches and playing fields were usually primitive and sometimes downright dangerous. Richard Daft, one of Clarke’s players, remembered the great Fuller Pilch mowing one wicket with a borrowed scythe and another player running into a covey of partridges when fielding the ball at Truro.

The ground found by Dr Grace for his great match was in this tradition. It lay behind the Full Moon Hotel at Stokes Croft (quite near the centre of Bristol nowadays) and until the previous autumn had been a ploughed field. Dr Grace’s gardener and some other men had prepared it; the pitch was said to be ‘first rate’ but the rest of the ground ‘rough and uneven’. Uncle Pocock and Alfred Grace played along with Dr Grace; little Gilbert watched with his mother who ‘sat in her pony-carriage all day’. W.G. remembered little more about the occasion than that some of the England team played in top hats, but doubtless the talk in the Grace household was of little else for months before and after the match. Despite being outnumbered two to one, Clarke’s Eleven won by 149 runs.

The fixture was repeated the following year. Clarke was unable to play because of eye trouble – he had lost an eye playing fives at the age of 30 – but Dr Grace had three of his sons playing with him: Henry junior, Alfred, aged fifteen, and thirteen-year-old E.M., who understandably made little impression at the crease against such distinguished opposition (he scored 1 and 3). Long afterwards, E.M. remembered: ‘I was very small indeed then, and when an appeal for lbw was made against me from a ball which hit me high up in the stomach, I felt that I wasn’t tall enough to be able to doubt the umpire’s word.’ However, he fielded so well at long-stop in difficult conditions that after the match Clarke presented him with a bat and his mother with a book Cricket: Notes by W. Bollard, with a letter containing practical hints by William Clarke, in which he wrote: ‘Presented to Mrs Grace by William Clarke, Secretary All-England XI’. One can imagine seven-year-old Gilbert’s pride that his mother and brother should be singled out by such a great man. It has survived; in 1996 it fetched £4,600 at auction.

West Gloucestershire, all twenty-two of them, made only 48 in their first innings (top score: Henry Grace, junior, 13) and 76 in the second (top score: Henry Grace, senior, 14), losing by 167 runs. Alfred Grace collected a ‘pair’. Julius Caesar, who relished inferior slow bowling, made top score (33 and 78) in both of All-England’s second innings to emphasise the disparity between the two sides. Bickley took sixteen wickets in West Gloucestershire’s first innings; indeed, only three of the home side got into double figures in the entire match. To look at the scorecard is to realise what a primitive game cricket was in those days – one can visualise the clumsy swiping that would have characterised the Bristolians’ play and the huge gap that existed between their play and that of the wily professionals. Little did they know that the dark-eyed little boy watching from the sidelines would in little more than a decade transform the face of the game, and almost single-handed overthrow the supremacy of the professional cricketer.

The All England team returned to Bristol the following year to play a Bristol and District XXII, this time on the Clifton ground, and won again but only by twelve runs this time. By the end of the century, the field behind the Full Moon was built over.

There is a Gracean postscript: the All England team went into decline in the 1860s and its demise was hastened by the rise of another wandering team, the United South of England. The large gates it attracted were attributed mainly to its greatest star: W.G. Grace.

Gilbert continued to develop his talents on the pitch at The Chestnuts under his uncle’s careful tutelage, and at his boarding school. All three of his older brothers had started their cricket careers with West Gloucestershire and in 1857, at the precocious age of nine, it was Gilbert’s turn. The Bristol cricketing community had become used to the idea of precocious Graces.

By then, Gilbert had acquired a reasonable defensive technique and was learning how to play the ball away with a bit more power, still largely on the back foot. ‘Playing with a straight bat had become easy to me; and my uncle told me I was on the right track, and patiently I continued with it.’ He made his debut for his father’s club on 19 July, the day after his ninth birthday, against Bedminster. Batting last, he made 3 not out. He played twice more that summer, both times against West Gloucestershire’s keenest rivals Clifton, adding only one more run to his career total. By the following summer, he was learning how to play forward as well as back, but was yet to play attacking shots off the front foot, and he found the going against grown men just as tough, making 4 runs in five innings in 1858, and 12 runs in nine innings in 1859.

So far, there was little sign that Gilbert was anything special but that all changed in 1860, his twelfth year. He scored 9 in West Gloucestershire’s first game against Clifton but really came into his own in the return, a two-day affair played on 19 and 20 July. The Clifton bowling was softened up by E.M. and Alfred Pocock, who put on 126 for the first wicket, the nineteen-year-old E.M. going on to score a chanceless 150. Gilbert went in at number eight and by the close of play on the first day had scored a solid and patient 35 not out. The next day the twelve-year-old completed his half century and was finally out for 51. His father also distinguished himself by taking all ten Clifton wickets, nine clean bowled and the tenth caught by Alfred Grace. The following weekend W.G. made 16 against a combined team from Gloucester and Cheltenham, who were beaten by an innings and 27 runs.

He had also been working hard on his bowling and was occasionally called on by West Gloucestershire to turn his arm over, though, as he was first to admit, only when all else had failed. His batting of 1860 was something of a false dawn: the next season he made only 46 runs in ten innings, never once managing to reach double figures. He had shot up and was now tall for his age but his greater reach proved of little help that season. Perhaps his strength had not caught up with his height; more likely the opposition had got wise to his talent and did not wish to be shown up by a thirteen-year-old. The year, he recalled, ‘was not an encouraging one to me or my teachers’.

The next year, 1862, was a little better: Gilbert managed to score 24 not out against twenty-two men of Corsham and 18 against Gentlemen of Devon, totalling 53 in five innings. That year he left Rudgway School and went back home; his subsequent education consisting of private lessons with his brother-in-law, the Rev. John Walter Dann, a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, who had married his sister Blanche and became the much loved and respected vicar of Downend for half a century, and a devoted supporter of local cricket.

Then came a severe setback. Gilbert contracted a bad case of pneumonia and was bedridden for several weeks. In those pre-antibiotic days, pneumonia posed a real threat to life and for a while it was touch and go for the boy. He made a slow recovery but when it came it produced a rapid change. As if in reaction to the physical battering he had taken, he suddenly shot up several more inches in height, taking him to over 6 ft tall. By his fifteenth birthday in 1863, he was the tallest of the Grace brothers by several inches, and the strongest: he settled one fraternal argument by picking up his eldest brother Henry, by then a sturdy thirty-year-old weighing 12 stone, and dropping him somewhere else. He eventually grew to 6ft 2 1⁄2 inches tall, towering over most of his contemporaries, another important factor in his superiority over them.

Fully restored to health and grown to adult size, he made a real impact on the club game in the West Country that summer, scoring 350 in nineteen innings, at an average of 26.12. His top score came in his first innings of the summer in July when he hit 86 against Clifton. A few days later he scored an unbeaten 42 against Lansdown and in August made an unbeaten 52 for an embryonic Gloucestershire side got up by his father to play Somerset at Sydenham Fields, Bath. He had made great strides with the ball too and was now considered one of his club’s leading performers. Against Somerset he took 4–17 and 2–26.

The most notable event of the year for W.G. was that he was considered good enough to be matched against some of the best professional bowlers in the country. He was selected to play for Twenty-Two of Bristol and District against the All-England touring side at the Clifton ground at the end of August, the same fixture which he had watched enthralled as a boy of six nine years previously. It was every schoolboy’s dream and Gilbert was well aware of the enormous honour bestowed on him. He practised even more keenly in the weeks beforehand. ‘I knew right well that the contests in which I had played the last year or two were not to be compared with the contest on this occasion,’ he wrote later.

The game rated a small mention in the weekly Clifton Chronicle, which on the same page reported the discovery by some children of the body of a newly-born baby on Brandon Hill, a packed residents’ meeting to discuss a proposed new road from Bristol up to Clifton, then as now a genteel suburb, and the ticket prices for the new Bristol and South Wales Union Railway (the charges from Bristol to Stapleton Road, where Dr W.G. Grace would open his first practice nearly twenty years later, were 6d, 4d and 1½d for first, second and third class respectively).

William Clarke had died in 1856 but the All-England operation continued under the direction of George Parr. The team which came to Bristol consisted of some familiar faces – Julius Caesar, Ned Willsher and Alfred Clarke – plus some of the most outstanding professionals of the age. They included George Tarrant, the Cambridgeshire round-arm fast bowler, his county colleague Tom Hayward, a slim but graceful batsman, H.H. Stephenson, the Surrey all-rounder whose selection to lead the first tour party to Australia in 1861/2 greatly upset the northern professionals, the great Nottinghamshire fast bowler and the terror of Lord’s, John Jackson, R.C. Tinley, the lob bowler also of Nottinghamshire, and W.H. Moore, an amateur who had recently scored a century against the North. The Bristol team included the four oldest Grace boys: Henry, Alfred, Edward and Gilbert.

Opening the innings, E.M. smashed a swift 37 in his usual swashbuckling style before being given out lbw to Jackson. W.G. was down to bat at number ten, half-way down the order. Lunch was taken just before he was due to bat and Tarrant, nicknamed ‘Tear’em’ or ‘Tearaway’ because of his menacing appearance as he raced in to bowl at high speed, offered to give the youngster some practice. This act of kindness was all the more surprising as Tarrant was notorious in the game for his moodiness and short temper. (Interestingly, he became a close friend of E.M. when they toured Australia and New Zealand with George Parr’s team the following winter. Perhaps the fact that both operated on a short fuse helped to cement the relationship.)

When W.G. walked to the wicket Tarrant and Jackson were bowling, an awesome prospect for a fifteen-year-old but one which W.G. took in his stride, though he confessed to suffering from nerves before going out to bat. After a couple of overs Tinley was brought on to bowl his under-arm lobs. They held no terrors for W.G., who was well used to batting against E.M.’s lobs at home. He played the first over cautiously, then showed his mettle in the next over, pulling Tinley into the scoring tent. The crowd’s enthusiastic reception is easy to imagine. Unfortunately for the teenager, the success went to his head. In the next over he gave Tinley the charge, missed and was bowled, not the first or last time a headstrong young batsman has been undone by a wily pro. Still, W.G. walked off with a highly respectable 32 to his credit and professed himself thrilled with his performance. He had made the fourth best score, and fared better than his other brothers: Henry made a duck and Alfred 3 in a total of 212.

All England performed poorly against the enthusiastic Bristolians and were forced to follow on after making only 86 in their first innings, E.M. taking five wickets. The England stars fared little better in their second knock. When Edwin Stephenson, of Yorkshire, no mean batsman, came in, E.M. handed W.G. the ball, told him to toss it up and took himself off to the outfield. Sure enough, Stephenson swallowed the bait in W.G.’s first over, E.M. pulling off a magnificent catch to give the young man a distinguished first scalp at top level. All England were all out for 106, E.M. taking another five wickets. The Bristol XXII had won by an innings and 20 runs in under two days, although three had been set aside for the match. The result indicated the improvement in the Bristol players’ standards over their past decade, thanks in no small part to Dr Grace’s efforts. By now, E.M. was recognised as one of the finest players in the country.

W.G. finished off his season for West Gloucestershire in the autumnal conditions of October with 35 and 2 against Cheltenham College. But, for all his burgeoning self-confidence, he and his family cannot have realised just how rapidly he was progressing. That he was to demonstrate in style the following summer.

He was still only fifteen years when in June 1864 he was invited to play for the All-England XI against Lansdown. That the invitation was extended at all indicates that he must have mightily impressed the canny old All-England pros during his brief knock against them the previous summer. Perhaps it was a tribute to the Grace family’s influence, though E.M. was absent, still making his way home from Australia after the completion of Parr’s tour. His oldest brother Henry played for Lansdown. W.G. batted at number six and found himself at the wicket with the great John Lillywhite, who made a nonchalant century. W.G. batted with care, scoring 15 in half an hour until he had the misfortune to be run out by Lillywhite, the teenager presumably not daring to countermand the great man’s call. ‘I did not mind that,’ he manfully recalled. ‘I had played for the All England Eleven.’ The professionals duly won by an innings and 22 runs.

It was E.M.’s continuing absence that led to W.G.’s first game in London ten days later. For years various members of the clan had been invited by the South Wales Club to join its annual tour to London, the Graces being popular figures on the cricket fields of the principality. Henry suggested that W.G. take E.M.’s place and the young man was off to the capital for the first time in his life. His journey was nearly in vain. The first game was at The Oval against Surrey. When the brothers arrived, the Welsh captain, Mr J. Lloyd, took Henry aside and asked him if his brother would mind stepping down for the second match, against Gentlemen of Sussex at Hove, as he wanted to include a more experienced player. He reckoned without the Graces’ unflinching sense of family solidarity. Henry was firm: Gilbert would play in both matches or neither. Indeed Henry went further: if Gilbert wasn’t picked, he himself would not play and no Graces would ever appear for South Wales again. Lloyd backed down. W.G. scored 5 and 38 but the real fireworks came on 14, 15 and 16 July at the historic Hove ground, one of cricket’s most splendid arenas, and left Lloyd looking very stupid indeed.

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 handicaps, 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:

A finer innings could not be witnessed; good bowling (with several changes) being tried against him; but his runs were gained in admirable cricket form, not even the shadow of a chance for a catch being given. During the play he was frequently applauded; but upon retiring the applause was general.

The bowling, moreover, was of the highest class, including James Lillywhite and Ned Willsher. But perhaps the most interesting fact about his innings was that it showed how thoughtful and thorough – one might even say professional – W.G. was about his cricket. During that summer, he had given a lot of thought to field placing in the first-class game. The prevailing othodoxy was that batsmen should play straight bowling defensively. Consequently, there was no need to have anyone fielding in the deep because big hitting was almost non-existent.

The Grace brothers broke from this with a vengeance. E.M. was the first to cock a snook at the theory: to him, every ball was fair game, to be hit out of the ground if possible in his own unique flailing style. Observing his success, frequently from the non-striker’s end, W.G. determined to copy his example, and put it into practice against the Players of the South.

Every time I had a ball the least bit overpitched, I hit it hard over the bowler’s head, and did not trouble about where it was going. My height enabled me to get over those that were slightly short and I played them hard: long-hops off the wicket I pulled to square leg or long-on, without the slightest hesitation.

The Surrey club rewarded his display with a fine silver-plated bat. It was after this that he was first called ‘the Champion’.

Precocious though W.G. was, another Grace was already hard on his heels. Fred, still only fifteen, was thought promising enough to be invited to join his older brother for Gentlemen of the South against I Zingari at Canterbury on 10 August, the second match of the Canterbury Week. But he was pressed into service to play for them against the North in the opening match of the week when the Kent slow bowler ‘Farmer’ Bennett was stuck in a train en route to the game.

Fred batted at number eleven and made 1 and 5 not out. Against I Zingari W.G. scored 30 and 50 while Fred – ‘quite a youth’ remarked The Times – chipped in with 17 in the second innings.

W.G.’s run aggregate in all matches for 1866 was remarkably similar to the previous season: 2,168, making him already the most prolific batsman in the country, with more than 600 in hand over the next man, C.F. Buller. His average significantly improved, to 54. And in his fifteen first-class innings his progress was apparent: a total of 640 runs at an average of 42.

Around this time, there were rumours that Dr Henry Grace had made enquiries about the possibility of his son going up to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. Perhaps there was no substance in it for when a cricketing cleric, Canon E.S. Carter, tried to persuade him to go up to Oxford in 1866 W.G. told him regretfully that he did not think his father would allow him to spare the time from his impending medical studies. Judging by his protracted studies at Bristol Medical School and elsewhere, W.G. might have had trouble in satisfying the Oxford or Cambridge examiners, but he would certainly have rewritten all the university cricket records. He always enjoyed playing the universities, putting their young attacks to the sword for the MCC year after year, and nothing gave him greater pride in later life than attending the University match at Lord’s in 1895 to watch his eldest son, W.G. junior, gain his first Cambridge Blue.

But if he hoped to dominate the batting scene in the 1867 season, he was to be disappointed. It started badly and never really got going. First he suffered a sprained ankle and a split finger early in the season. Hardly had he regained fitness than he was struck down by scarlet fever in the middle of July and was off for six weeks. Even when he returned he was still feeling the effects of the illness and the rest of the season was a virtual write-off. Despite all his problems, it was W.G.’s best-ever season with the ball: he took thirty-nine first-class wickets at an average of only 7.51, bowling much more briskly than he was to do in later life.

His performance with the bat in his first big match of the season, for England v Middlesex, was promising enough. It was Middlesex’s first game against an England XI, played for the benefit of the professionals on the Lord’s staff. Four thousand spectators turned out to support it, and W.G. treated them to a sparkling 75 in a dashing partnership with the Old Etonian Alfred Lubbock, who hit 129. W.G. then proceeded to take 6–53 as Middlesex were demolished by an innings.

The dreadful state of the Lord’s pitch was demonstrated by his next two appearances there. South of the Thames played North of the Thames, a game put on to replace the North v South fixture, which had to be cancelled because of the schism betweeen the northern and southern players. The general standard of batting had improved but three innings had been completed by the end of the first day, the South being skittled for only 32 in their first knock, the North for 61. Set 73 to win in their second innings, the North were all out for 46 on the second day, W.G. taking 6–28 and E.M. snaffling four brilliant catches in his habitual position of point.

It was much the same story when the Gentlemen met the Players at Lord’s on 8 July. Again thirty wickets fell on the first day, eleven of them to W.G. (three in the first, eight in the second). There was no doubt about the culprit: The Times dismissed the wicket as ‘a kind of tessellated, lumpy sward, where patches of rusty yellow strive with faded green’. Faced with 55 to win, W.G. and Alfred Lubbock saw the Gentlemen to an eight-wicket victory, W.G. hitting the winning runs with a cut for 3 to the grandstand.

But when the teams squared up again at The Oval a week later, W.G. was missing, struck down with scarlet fever. It was six weeks before he was fit enough to return to the fray, for England versus a joint Surrey/Sussex team at The Oval on 26 August, in a benefit match for Tom Lockyer, the Surrey wicket-keeper. W.G. took eight wickets in the match and was loudly cheered by a large crowd, delighted to see their young hero recovered when he walked out to join E.M. at the wicket, though he was caught at slip for only 12.

Despite his truncated season Lillywhite’s Annual was unstinting in its praise for W.G.: ‘A magnificent batsman, his defence and hitting powers being second to none and his scoring for the last three years marvellous. Plays for Gentlemen v Players and is a host in himself. A splendid fielder and thrower from leg.’

The summer of 1868 was a long, hot one, producing fast, dry pitches and a series of remarkable scores. At Clifton College, one E.F.S. Tylecote, for instance, amassed 404 not out, albeit in an inter-school match, which would not have gone unnoticed by local boy Gilbert Grace. The high scoring led to fears that bowlers were not good enough to restrain the batsmen (the low scores of the previous summer being conveniently forgotten). The same worry is voiced nowadays whenever batsmen look like getting the upper hand, giving rise to the thought that cricketers and those who follow them do not change much.

W.G. wasn’t complaining: he was now at the peak of his ability and to prove it rattled up three first-class centuries. While other bowlers toiled, he mopped up forty-four first-class wickets at an average of only 16.38. He also became the first batsman for more than half a century to score two centuries in the same first-class match. An exotic addition to a memorable season came in the shape of a touring team of Australian Aboriginals who, although not of the highest class, won hearts wherever they went and also entertained the crowds with exhibitions of boomerang throwing.

It was around this time that the teenaged Lord Harris remembered being taken to Lord’s with a few other members of the Eton XI ‘for the express purpose of seeing W.G. bat and thereby having our own ideas improved’. It was a damp morning and the sight they were treated to was not of their hero (who was in fact only three years older than Harris) batting but of a young man in an overcoat arguing with the groundsman that the pitch was not fit to play on.

The MCC v England fixture was revived in June at Lord’s for the first time for twelve years as a benefit for the Marylebone Cricketers’ Fund, the Lord’s professionals, and W.G. showed his superiority over his batting contemporaries with 29 out of 96 in England’s first innings and a superb 66 out of 179 in the second. Later that month he recorded his first century for the Gentlemen v the Players, 134 at Lord’s out of a total of 193. He himself regarded it as one of the best innings he ever played – even a half-century on the dreadful Lord’s square was a creditable achievement. The pitch that day was described thus: ‘… in nine cricket grounds out of ten within twenty miles of London, whether village green or county club ground, a local club could find a better wicket, in spite of drought and in spite of their poverty, than Marylebone Club supplied to the Players of England.’ Although the wicket was its usual skittish self, it was also hard and fast, which suited W.G.’s attacking style admirably. He went in at first wicket down after E.M. was run out for only one and, said The Times, ‘played one of the finest, and most assuredly the most prolific, innings at Lord’s during the present season’. Hardly anything passed his bat and to rub salt into the professionals’ wounds, Grace took 10–81 in the match to set up an eight-wicket win for the Gentlemen, which they followed up with a comprehensive innings and 87 runs victory at The Oval, their fourth in succession.

His historic pair of centuries – 130 and 102 not out – came at one of his happiest hunting grounds, the St Lawrence ground at Canterbury, for South of the Thames against North of the Thames, which again replaced the old North v South game. The only other time it had been performed was back in 1817 by the great all-rounder William Lambert, playing for Sussex v Epsom at Lord’s, hardly a comparable fixture. Grace modestly described his achievement as much easier than his 134 at Lord’s as there were boundaries at Canterbury and he did not have to run so much. Oddly enough, his side still lost.

Perhaps the most significant match he played in that summer was a two-day affair at Lord’s on 25 and 26 June, the first game played there by a club bearing the Gloucestershire name (it was not properly constituted until three years later). Appropriately for the family which was to dominate the county’s formative years, three of the Grace brothers played: E.M., W.G. and young Fred, still only seventeen but a batsman of the greatest promise. Their opponents were Middlesex Club and Ground, and the Graces bowled every ball against them, Gloucestershire emerging victorious by 134 runs. Although it would be another two years before they engaged another county, Gloucestershire were on their way.

In the summer of 1869, W.G. reached two landmarks: his twenty-first birthday and membership of the MCC. So eager was the club to enrol the young tyro that he was proposed by the Treasurer, T. Burgoyne, and seconded by the Secretary, R.A. (Bob) Fitzgerald (also spelt FitzGerald), who had been a vigorous reformer since taking up the post in 1863 and who was to be a stout friend and ally of W.G. Indeed, his championing of W.G. can be seen as evidence of his radical ways, for while there was no doubt that he was the finest batsman in the land, his somewhat obscure origins (to the metropolitan eye at least) would not normally have qualified him for MCC membership.

W.G. did not disappoint his patrons, making a century on his debut, 117 against Oxford University on Magdalen College’s ground at Cowley Marsh, and three more before the end of the season, against Surrey, Nottinghamshire and Kent. It was the start of a long and distinguished association in which W.G. was to score 7,780 runs, including nineteen centuries. In all matches in 1869, he scored nine centuries and was universally regarded as the finest batsman then playing the game. In its summary of the season, Lillywhite’s Annual went further: Grace was ‘generally admitted to be the most wonderful cricketer that ever handled a bat’. Young Fred was not far behind that summer, with five centuries to his name, including one score of 206.

Such was W.G.’s dominance of the bowlers that his occasional failures were greeted with astonishment. The North v South fixture was resumed that year, though some diehard Northerners – Parr, Carpenter and Hayward – refused to participate. The teams played each other three times, once in the Canterbury Festival, and W.G. was unexpectedly bowled third ball by J.C. ‘Jemmy’ Shaw, the Nottinghamshire left-arm pace bowler. The Daily Telegraph commented: ‘Imagine Patti [the famous opera singer] singing outrageously out of tune; imagine Mr Gladstone violating all the rules of grammar – and you have a faint idea of the surprise created by this incident.’ The writer added that he fancied Mr Grace to take his revenge in the second innings, and the great man concurred. ‘I fancy I’ll do a little better this time,’ he said as he walked out to bat again and indeed he did, with a whirlwind 96 out of 134 in partnership with Jupp.

The remark is evidence that the shy teenager of a few years earlier had matured into a self-confident young man. It was much the same story when MCC met Nottinghamshire. In the first innings W.G. was run out for 48 (still top score in an innings of 112) and was thoroughly outshone by the great Notts batsman Richard Daft, who scored an unbeaten 103. An essential element of W.G.’s make-up was his unrelenting competitiveness, whatever the standard of the match. He bet Daft that he would do better than him in his second innings and he was as good as his word. He thrashed a rapid 121, untypically offering several chances.

The news of Grace’s exploits had naturally spread all over the country but there were few opportunities for cricket lovers in many areas to see him in action. His appearances at that time were reserved for a relatively few venues: club grounds around Bristol, where he was well known, Lord’s and The Oval in London, and a few county grounds in the south such as Canterbury and Hove. Gloucestershire were not yet part of the informal county championship, apart from that. The cricket season consisted of a motley collection of first-class fixtures: the MCC played the counties, the Gentlemen played the Players twice and sometimes more, the North played the South, Gentlemen of the South played Gentlemen of the North, and so on.

At that stage of his career Grace rarely ventured out of the south or west. Thus the North v South fixture at Sheffield attracted great interest and a large crowd, for many of whom Grace was the chief attraction. (His Memorial Biography mistakenly described it as ‘his first appearance locally’, forgetting that he had captained the XVIII Youths of Nottingham and Sheffield there in 1866.) He did not let them down: opening the innings he rattled up 122 against a very strong attack. Charles Alcock later described it as ‘perhaps his most meritorious achievement’ of the season.

I remember well, how, in the short space of two hours, against the bowling of Freeman, Emmett, Iddison and Wootton, he scored 122 runs on a wicket in every way suitable to the Northern bowling, and with George Freeman – then at his best – in such deadly form that no other Southern batsman could so much as look at him.

The measure of W.G.’s superiority was that his ten team-mates contributed only 51. Then he took 6–57 when the North batted.

Almost as great a performance came in the Gentlemen of the South v the Players of the South at that favourite hunting ground, The Oval, in mid-July. On a perfect pitch and in perfect weather the Players clocked up 475, batting through until after lunch on the second day of what was only a three-day match and W.G. had no more luck than anyone else with the ball. But the Players’ huge score proved to be no more than an aperitif for the main dish. W.G. opened with B.B. Cooper, who was to pop up in opposition to him in Australia a few years later. Less than four hours later they had put on 283 to break the first-class record for the first wicket, a record which stood until 1892. W.G.’s share was 180, Cooper’s 101. The Daily Telegraph’s observations provide a striking description of Grace in action at the crease:

He has made even larger scores than the 180, but we doubt whether a better innings has ever been played by a cricketer past or present. The characteristic of Mr Grace’s play was that he knew exactly where every ball he hit would go. Just the strength required was expended and no more. When the fieldsmen were placed injudiciously too deep, he would quietly send a ball half-way towards them with a gentle tap and content himself with a modest single. If they came in a little nearer, the shoulders opened out and the powerful arms swung round as he lashed at the first loose ball and sent it away through the crowded ring of visitors until one heard a big thump as it struck against the farthest fence. Watching most other men – even good players – your main object is to see how they will defend themselves against the bowling; watching Mr Gilbert Grace, you can hardly help feeling as though the batsman himself were the assailant.

The Gentlemen eventually totalled 553 all out and the match inevitably petered out in a draw.

It was not success all the way for Grace that year. He took a Gloucestershire XI by train to play the boys of Marlborough College and on the way wagered that he would score a century and hit the ball into Sun Lane, a massive blow which had only ever been achieved once before. This was one bet that W.G. lost: he was bowled for only 6 by a boy named Kempe, who thus achieved what the cream of English cricket would have dearly loved to have done. The boy, a fast bowler, also dismissed the next batsman cheaply, who on returning to the pavilion remarked that he would have coped easily but for the bad light. To his great credit, Grace replied: ‘It was just the opposite with me. I could see it perfectly but I couldn’t play it.’

To cap it, he attended evening service in the chapel, where ‘Sweet Saviour, Bless Us Ere We Go’ was sung. To the amusement of all, it contained the highly appropriate line:

The scanty triumphs Grace hath won

The heathen in his blindness bows down to wood and stone.