Читать книгу WG Grace - Robert Low - Страница 8

THE year is 1858, the scene the garden of a large house in the village of Downend, near Bristol. The big lawn is shaded by several spreading chestnut trees. It is an early summer’s day, clear and bright, a light breeze chases a few clouds quickly across the blue sky. In the garden, a stocky teenage boy in shirt-sleeves is driving three cricket stumps into the grass at the end of the lawn nearest the house. A strip of grass has been mown shorter than the rest to make a pitch. A single stump has already been set up some twenty yards away.

Another young man, sporting a dark moustache, is rolling up his shirt-sleeves. Two older men, well into middle age, talk with each other as they take off their jackets and lay them on the grass. A little boy of seven capers around the lawn and begs to be allowed to play with the grown-ups. A peal of laughter comes from the edge of the lawn under a large chestnut tree where stand a middle-aged lady and her daughters – two young women and two much younger girls in their early teens, in blouses and demure ankle-length skirts. Occasionally they bend to stroke two dogs lying at their feet, a golden retriever and a pointer. Another pointer crouches near by, wagging its tail and watching the activity on the lawn intently as if waiting for an invitation to join in.

There is one other person on the lawn: a boy about ten years old, kneeling as he straps a pad on to his leg. That done, he picks up a bat from the grass beside him, stands up and walks to a position just in front of the stumps. He is a slim, slight figure compared to the adults, with jet-black hair and intense dark eyes that stand out against his pale face. He has an air of seriousness, watchfulness and concentration.

The middle-aged men and the smallest boy stroll to positions around the lawn. The young man with the moustache walks up the wicket, exchanges a word with the dark-haired boy and proceeds to crouch behind the stumps. The teenager picks up a cricket ball, waits for the dark-haired boy to take guard, then runs a few paces to the single stump and delivers the ball with a round-arm slinging action. The boy picks his bat up cleanly, plants his padded left leg down the wicket and strikes the ball on the off side towards the young women chatting under the chestnut. As it speeds towards them, bouncing off the uneven surface of the lawn, the black dog at their feet snaps out of his crouch and leaps at the ball as it breasts him, knocks it down with his chest and pounces on it. At this, the girls laugh and clap and the men cheer. ‘Well stopped, Ponto sir!’ shouts one, as the dog picks the ball up in his mouth and trots towards the bowler, his tail wagging furiously. Turning towards the batsman, one of the older men says quietly, ‘And well hit, Gilbert.’ The older woman, who has been watching the episode closely, nods approvingly.

Lost in a world of his own, the dark-haired boy does not appear to have noticed the dog’s antics, nor heard the word of praise from his father. William Gilbert Grace rehearses the off-drive again, then resumes his guard, waiting for the next delivery.

As we near the end of the twentieth century there is much discussion and soul-searching in many British sports about how to spot, train and develop children with sporting talent. In tennis and cricket particularly, games invented in Britain and which used to spawn a steady stream of great players, there seems a dreadful dearth of potential world-beaters. If by chance a good cricketer is unearthed, there is reluctance to blood him in the demanding arena of Test cricket. Yet in other countries bright youngsters are pitched into international matches while still in their teens. In Australia the country’s most promising young players are invited to attend the National Cricket Academy of excellence in Adelaide and submitted to a demanding year-long training programme to prepare them for greater things, with notable success. After England had lost several successive Ashes series in the 1980s and 1990s by embarrassing margins, the cry went up: Why can’t we do the same?

Perhaps these things don’t have to be done by governments or governing bodies. A century and a half ago, William Gilbert Grace was born into a home-grown sporting academy, whose record would stand comparison with any official institution charged with turning out good sportsmen. His father and favourite uncle were keen cricketers, his four brothers all fine players. Of the five Grace boys, three became among the best cricketers in England, and Gilbert the greatest the game had ever seen. Even their mother was, untypically for the Victorian age, an enthusiast who was highly knowledgeable about the game and followed her sons’ progress keenly.

Their father, Henry Mills Grace, was born on 21 February 1808, in the Somerset village of Long Ashton. His own father, also called Henry, was said to have been an Irish footman at Long Ashton Court who married the daughter of the chief steward. It is attractive to think of the Grace boys having Irish blood. Certainly, they displayed all the classic Irish traits of athleticism, physical courage, wit and good-natured cheek. Henry Mills Grace’s was a typical rural childhood of the age: he grew up well versed in the traditional country pursuits, particularly riding, but he also acquired an early interest in cricket and, as a boy, played the game as much as he could. His distinguished son later described with sympathy the problems young Henry had in practising the game as much as he clearly would have liked. ‘If he had had the opportunities afforded to his children he would have attained a good position as an all-round player,’ wrote W.G. in 1891. ‘Clubs were few in number in his boyhood and grounds were fewer still.’

Sport was not yet the integral part of the school curriculum that it was to become in the mid-Victorian era so Henry’s cricketing development was restricted. Like many a father before and since, he was determined his own sons should not suffer the same lack of facilities, which helps to explain the intense devotion he was later to lavish on their sporting education, with such remarkable results. A sturdy 5 ft 10 in tall, weighing 13 stone, Henry Grace was not a man to be put off by anything.

Settling on a career in medicine, he was articled to a surgeon in Bristol, after the custom of the times, but did not allow his studies to interfere with his cricket. Two or three times a week he and some friends would rise early in the morning to head for Durdham Down, a large expanse of open common ground to the north-west of the city, where Gloucestershire were to play their first county match against Surrey many years later in 1870 with Henry Grace’s sons among the participants. On Durdham Down, Henry and company would practise their cricket between five and eight o’clock, Henry batting right-handed but bowling and throwing in left-handed.

He undertook further studies at the combined medical school of Guy’s and St Thomas’s Hospitals in London and on qualifying embarked on the life of a country doctor which he was to be for the rest of his life. Henry was twenty-three when he married Martha Pocock in 1831. Born on 18 July 1812, she was barely nineteen on her wedding day but was a perfect match for the energetic, hard-working young doctor.

She was a spirited girl from a decidedly eccentric background. Her father, George Pocock, was proprietor of a private boarding school at St Michael’s Hill, Bristol, and as fervent about religion as Henry Grace was about cricket. So keen was he to spread the word that he toured the West Country in a horse-drawn trap, erecting a tent which he called his ‘itinerant temple’ in places where there was no church but a likely supply of worshippers.

He was also obsessed with box-kites. Family legend had it that he and his daughters once drove from Bristol to London in a carriage drawn by a kite, overtaking the Duke of York’s more conventionally-powered coach on the way. That may have been the same journey as one he reportedly made in 1828 to the Ascot races where his kite-carriage was said to have greatly impressed George IV. Pocock was also said to have designed a kite-borne chair, which sounds like an early prototype of a hang-glider, in which young Martha was once strapped and transported across the Avon Gorge.

Martha grew to be a most remarkable woman, and more than a century after her death remains possibly the most influential in the history of cricket. Even today cricket is overwhelmingly a male-dominated sport, and women who are both passionate and knowledgeable about the game are regarded as something of an oddity by many men. However, the informed cricket woman is to be seen, instantly recognisable, at Lord’s or any county ground, as much a part of the scenery as the players, umpires or scorers. Martha Grace was the archetype, and has yet to be improved upon. The great cricketer Richard Daft said of her, ‘She knew ten times more about cricket than any lady I ever met.’

She was an imposing figure, ‘of magnificent physique and indomitable will’, and W.G. strongly resembled her physically. Quite where her love of cricket sprang from is uncertain; perhaps from her brother Alfred (‘Uncle Pocock’) who was also a key figure in the Grace boys’ cricket education. At any rate Martha took as much a part in the coaching of her sons as her husband and closely followed her talented sons’ progress. She watched them play whenever she could and was forthright in her criticisms. In her old age she regularly attended Gloucestershire’s matches and was noted for her pithy comments on the play and the players. Indeed it appears to have been part of a Gloucestershire’s batsman’s duties, once dismissed, to pay his respects to Mrs Grace as she sat in the stand and to listen attentively as he was told just where he had gone wrong. For some reason she disliked left-handed batsmen and fielders who returned the ball underarm (which would presumably have doubly disqualified David Gower from her pantheon).

Throughout her life she demanded to be kept informed of her sons’ performances: when they were playing away from home, they would post to her the day’s scoresheets or send her a telegram informing her of their achievements that day, which would arrive the same evening. She cut out all newspaper reports of their doings and pasted them in large scrapbooks. She was their greatest supporter, and author of the most famous letter in English cricket. This was to George Parr, captain of the All England XI in which she recommended her third son, Edward Mills Grace, for selection in the England team, and added that she had a younger son who would eventually be even better because his back-play was sounder and he always played with a straight bat.

There is a touching vignette of the old lady watching the Lansdown Club in 1884 playing the American tourists, Gentlemen of Philadelphia, and being offered a chair by a player who did not recognise her. As they talked of the game, she said, ‘I taught my sons to play. I used to bowl to them.’

Henry Grace and his bride settled in the Gloucestershire village of Downend, four miles outside the bustling city of Bristol, and never moved from it thereafter. Grace was a highly conscientious doctor and a good surgeon, whose practice extended for a twelve-mile radius around Downend. He covered it on horseback and was often not back home until midnight. He was surgeon to the Royal Gloucestershire Reserves and did much work for the underprivileged as medical officer to the Poor Law. A jovial and popular man, he ranged easily over the classes. He was a friend of the Duke of Beaufort and a frequent visitor to Badminton to hunt during the winter.

His obituary in the Lancet noted: ‘Few better horsemen ever rode to cover.’ He was also a man of strong views and principles. W.G. wrote of him: ‘He took great care that the foxes were preserved and was so strict that he used to say that a man who would kill a fox would commit almost any crime.’ He seems to have been decidedly progressive in many ways. He never smoked, and drank but little, ‘a glass of wine with his dinner and a little whisky and water at night’, reported W.G., also a lifelong non-smoker – apart perhaps from the occasional cigar – but liked a glass of whisky at lunchtime during a cricket match and enjoyed champagne too.

The Graces’ first home was Downend House, on whose lawn the doctor lost no time in laying down a cricket pitch in front of the house where he could practise. However, having his own pitch was never going to be enough for the cricket-mad doctor. Interest in the game was growing to such an extent in Downend and the surrounding villages, as elsewhere in the country, that Dr Grace and his friends decided to set up their own club. They found some common land at Rodway Hill at Mangotsfield, about a mile to the east of Downend, and cleared, levelled and fenced in some forty square yards of it to create their own ground.

Thus was born the Mangotsfield Cricket Club, with Dr Grace and Arthur Pocock its two leading lights. Pocock, a good racquets player, was a novice at cricket but took to it with a will and was soon an accomplished all-rounder. He was a great one for practice, a habit he was to pass on to his nephews. The club prospered, aided by two of Mrs Grace’s nephews, William Rees and George Gilbert, who came to stay at Downend House during the summer holidays for several years and showed themselves a cut above the average local player. At around the same time, the West Gloucestershire club had been founded at Coalpit Heath, a couple of miles north of Downend, by another local enthusiast, Henry Hewitt. The two clubs became fierce rivals, with West Gloucestershire at first holding the advantage. Mangotsfield, however, gradually overhauled their rivals and in 1847 the clubs agreed to pool their resources. The new club went under the name of West Gloucestershire but was based at Rodway Hill, where it played for twenty more years. West Gloucestershire became the dominant club of the area; the only other team to pose a regular challenge was Lansdown.

Henry and Martha Grace lived at Downend House for nineteen years, during which time Martha gave birth to eight of their nine children, five sons and four daughters. The four boys born there were Henry, the eldest, (31 January 1833), Alfred (17 May 1840), Edward Mills (28 November 1841) and William Gilbert, who arrived on 18 July 1848, his mother’s thirty-sixth birthday. The girls were Annie, born in 1834, Fanny Hellings (1838), Alice Rose (1845) and the youngest, Elizabeth Blanche, who like W.G. was known by her second name, and was born in 1847. By 1850, with their last child on the way, the Graces needed a bigger house and moved across the road to The Chestnuts, where George Frederick (‘Fred’) was born on 13 December 1850 to complete the family.

Downend is no longer a self-contained village but part of the straggling suburbs of Bristol. Downend House still stands there, although its ground floor has been extensively remodelled and in 1996 was home to offices of a lift firm and a catering company. It bears a small plaque which states that ‘Dr W.G. Grace, Famous Gloucester Cricketer, was born here on the 18th July, 1848’. Another plaque proclaims it to be part of the Kingswood Heritage Trail.

The Chestnuts (or The Chesnuts as the Graces eccentrically spelt it) was much more suitable for the large and lively family than the relatively cramped conditions of Downend House. It was, according to a contemporary description, ‘a square, plain building … ivy creeping all over, with pretty flower garden, and numerous outhouses … Walking up the carriage drive, past the lodge and old summer house, you come to the main entrance … beyond, the orchard, some 80 yards in length, high wall on the left.’ Still farther beyond was a view of barley and oat fields stretching away to the villages of Frenchay and Stapleton in the far distance.

Alas, the house no longer exists. On its site stands a spectacularly hideous British Telecom building, dating from 1968, and adorned with an antenna tower for mobile telephones. Next to it is a 1980s shopping parade, decorated with a portrait of W.G. Behind the buildings, there is a field divided into allotments, which must be the garden of The Chestnuts. It still presents an attractively rural aspect.

The apple trees in one of the orchards – for there were, in fact, two – stood in the way of Dr Grace’s ideal: his own cricket pitch. With Arthur Pocock and eldest son Henry, by now a strapping teenager, he set to and felled most of them. Edward Mills (later better known, like W.G., by his initials E.M.) took over the job with relish as he grew older, making the cricket field bigger and better – he was always a keen organiser, as he showed when he ran Gloucestershire C.C.’s affairs for nearly forty years. A piece of canvas, hung on three poles like a beach windbreak, was put up behind the batsman’s end to do the job of wicketkeeper and the stage was set. Here the Grace family practised with a dedication bordering on the obsessional, in the early morning or late in the evening, co-opting anybody and everybody to help: maids, the bootboy, but only very occasionally one of the Grace sisters, despite a legend that grew up when W.G. was young that the girls fielded with enthusiasm while the boys batted. One young Downend man called Alf Monks was regularly invited to bowl. As an incentive, the Grace boys put two-shilling coins or half-crowns on the stumps and told Alf he could keep any that he knocked off. Although he rarely succeeded, he was usually compensated with five shillings for his efforts, so he rarely lost out.

What a fortunate childhood! ‘It was as natural for me and everyone at home to walk out to the ground as it is for every boy in England to go into his nursery,’ W.G. mused later. ‘And what boy with a choice at his command would prefer the latter?’

The most remarkable participants in the family practice sessions were the Graces’ dogs, Don and Ponto, the two pointers, and Noble, the retriever, and by all accounts the best cricketer of the three. Family legend had it that the dogs were connoisseurs of the game. They were said to position themselves behind the bowler and if the ball was pitched on the off side they would make off in that direction even before the batsman had hit it. If he pulled it from outside off stump to leg they would decline to run after it. One suspects the notorious leg-pulling of the whole Grace clan behind this story.

W.G. – ‘Young Gilbert’ – had the best of all worlds as a boy. His older brothers were still around for practice and his father and Uncle Pocock still in the prime of life and eager to coach him. Gilbert was fielding for them all from the moment he could run around, and he soon picked up a bat too. Uncle Pocock took a special interest in coaching him and was to be a big influence on the boy. W.G. was always at great pains to emphasise that his uncle insisted he played with a straight bat from the first. Perhaps this was out of guilt that he and Dr Grace had allowed E.M. to develop bad habits through not having the correct-sized bat. Uncle Pocock worked on W.G.’s stance and his footwork and for years insisted that he do no more than defend his wicket. ‘There must be no playing or hitting wildly,’ was the instruction and Gilbert applied himself with total dedication. He claimed he was not a ‘natural’ player to whom the art of batting came easily; but his uncle had obviously spotted something in the boy. He insisted he learn to bat the right way: left shoulder forward, head over the ball, and watch the ball all the way. Gilbert applied himself diligently. Indeed he himself thought that what marked him out from E.M. and Fred was his perseverance, a quality he possessed in abundance. ‘I had to work as hard at learning cricket as ever I worked at my profession or anything else,’ he wrote later.

When there were no adults around, Gilbert co-opted a stable-boy and some boys from the village, chalking a wicket on the wall in the fashion of boys throughout the ages. Sometimes he would play with a broom-handle instead of a bat. It is interesting to note that some of the finest batsmen in cricket history have devised similar practice routines as small boys, when there was no one else to play with. The very best shared a devotion bordering on the obsessional. As a solitary boy in the outback, Don Bradman practised with a stump and a ball he would throw up and hit, and the greatest batsman of modern times, Brian Lara, did much the same as a child in Trinidad, throwing marbles against a wall and using a broom-handle or ruler to deal with the rebounds. (If he missed, he declared himself out.) It would be difficult to devise a better home-made way of honing hand-eye co-ordination. In Gilbert’s case his reflexes were further sharpened by the high number of underarm ‘shooters’ bowled at him by the village boys.

At the age of about six, he was given his first bat, his father and uncle being determined to avoid the mistake they had made with E.M. However, in the family practices opportunities to use it were limited. The older ones had seniority: they had fifteen minutes batting at a time, the little ones, Gilbert and Fred, only five. When not batting the youngsters fielded, trying to keep E.M.’s booming on-drives from going into the woods or the neighbouring quarry beyond long-on. The hours of practice must not only have sharpened the skills of boys who would eventually be among the country’s finest fielders; they also contributed to W.G.’s extraordinary stamina.

Cricket was by no means the only interest to occupy Gilbert’s time. He enjoyed all the usual diversions of a country boy, roaming the woods and fields and educating himself in the ways of nature. He was particularly keen on collecting birds’ eggs and snakes, the latter of which he would smuggle into the house to the consternation of his sisters.

He first went to the village school, run by a Miss Trotman, and was then entrusted to a private tutor, Mr Curtis, at Winterbourne, a couple of miles away. Nowadays he would have to cross the M4 to do it; he probably walked there and back. That was nothing in those days: Uncle Pocock routinely walked twelve miles to Downend just for cricket practice. Alfred and Edward had been sent away to boarding school and after Mr Curtis’s tuition young Gilbert went to a local boarding school, Rudgway House, run by a Mr Malpas, until he was fourteen.

One of W.G.’s contemporary biographers, W. Methven Brownlee, describes him at Rudgway House as ‘a steady working lad, accurate at mathematics, with no mischief in him’. The Memorial Biography of Dr W.G. Grace, published in 1919, summarises his educational achievements succinctly: ‘Of his school days the traditions are those of happy activity not of bookish application; invariably he bore an excellent character.’ His greatest achievement was to be marbles champion, ‘on one occasion clearing out the school’, according to Brownlee, with the covert assistance of one of the masters, Mr Bernard, who had taken a shine to Gilbert’s sister Alice and had clearly enlisted the boy to aid his cause. Gilbert may have been of some help, for Mr Bernard eventually married Alice and quit teaching to become a doctor, like his brothers-in-law.

The Grace girls threw themselves into family and community activities with the same vigour as their brothers. E.C. Biggs, the postmaster’s son, remembered one of them – probably Blanche – helping out when he mentioned that they needed curtains for the back of the stage at the annual concert to raise money for Downend Cricket Club. She used to play the harp or get guest artists to play at the event, and on this occasion she offered the Graces’ own drawing-room curtains, with words that might have come from any Grace, male or female: ‘Anything to help the good old game.’

The Grace boys hunted in a pack. The smaller orchard at The Chestnuts was a magnet for local kids, who would throw stones at the trees, then dash inside and pick up any apples they had dislodged. Woe betide them if the Grace boys caught them at it. One scrumper related how the Graces ‘came after us with carriage whips’. One local’s pockets were so stuffed with apples that they prevented him from crawling under the gate to make his getaway. ‘He received a nice cut or two with the whip before he could manage to shake off his coat and run.’ But the Graces did not bear a grudge: the boy got his coat back as soon as he returned to apologise.

The Graces’ home was a magnet for the village kids in the autumn too, when they would search for the sweet chestnuts that gave the house its name. They did so one Sunday, forgetting that the Graces would all be at home. Spotting the intruders, the brothers came charging down the drive, young Fred leading the way. He picked up a rock-hard pear and hurled it so accurately that it knocked one of the boys out cold. W.G. arrived, picked up the unconscious child and carried him indoors. The others hovered anxiously at the gate until Fred’s victim emerged with a broad smile and a shilling given him by W.G.

The Grace brothers were in large measure chips off the old block. All qualified as doctors except for Fred, the youngest, who was only denied the title by his untimely death as he neared the end of his medical studies. ‘They were all, more or less, crack shots, fast runners, devoted to the chase, and have long distinguished themselves in many a pedestrian contest, for all of which they have long been celebrated in the “amateur county”,’ reported Haygarth’s Cricket Scores & Biographies. Moreover, they emulated their father in their energy, enthusiasm and enjoyment of life, and they were devoted to each other and to the family. E.C. Biggs, son of the Downend postmaster, painted this evocative portrait of them in a letter to the Bristol Evening World:

When a boy the Grace brothers were always pointed out to me as an example because of the way they looked after their mother. If it was a concert one of them would take her; if it was a meet of the hounds they would see that she was at it in her pony-carriage, and if the ice would bear on the old quarry they would get her in a chair and push it about in front of them as they were skating.

Henry, the oldest, was apprenticed to his father until he moved to take over a mining practice at Kingswood Hill, Gloucestershire. He was also medical officer to the Bristol workhouse infirmary, and took a keen interest in health education, on which he gave several lectures. Of all the brothers, he was probably the most interested in the wider application of his medical expertise, followed by Alfred. E.M. and W.G. were general practitioners par excellence, but showed little interest in broader medical matters. Henry was also a fine cricketer, however. A contemporary record described him thus: ‘He is an energetic and excellent bat, bowls well, round-armed of middle speed, and fields generally at point, where he is both good and active.’ He played at Lord’s several times, his first appearance being for South Wales in a two-day match against MCC at Lord’s in July 1861, when he made top score of 63 not out in the first innings (South Wales won by seven wickets thanks to an undefeated 41 by nineteen-year-old E.M. Grace) and he maintained a close connection with the game throughout his life. He died of apoplexy in 1895 at the age of sixty-two.

Alfred, seven years his junior, was the least gifted or interested in the game of the five but still capable enough to score several hundreds in club cricket. He rated a mention in Haygarth’s Cricket Scores and Biographies: ‘Mr Alfred Grace never appeared at Lord’s … he is, however, a pretty good cricketer … and his post in the field is usually long-stop.’ He qualified as a doctor in 1864 and took over a practice in Chipping Sodbury, which he developed very successfully: his records showed that he attended to one hundred and fifty confinements a year. He had a whole series of public appointments in addition to his private practice: medical officer to the local workhouse, public vaccinator, certifying factory surgeon for the district, deputy coroner for the Lower division of Gloucestershire and medical officer to the Coalpit Heath collieries. He also took over the post of surgeon to the Royal Gloucestershire Hussars from his father, eventually becoming Lieutenant-Colonel.

He was a good boxer but his great passion was for country pursuits, particularly hunting: he followed the Duke of Beaufort’s hounds several times a week, and was famous throughout the district for his flair and daring. He was once claimed to have jumped a thirty-foot-wide stream on an Irish thoroughbred, and it was said of him that for thirty years he never had to buy a hunter of his own, but was given the most difficult horses to ride by his friends. He was an immensely popular figure, often referred to in local literature as ‘the hunting doctor’. The wonder is that he was able to find time for all his interests. He was the only smoker of the five brothers, yet he lived the longest: he died in 1916, aged seventy-six.

If W.G. had never existed, old Dr Grace could still have boasted of siring one of the finest cricketers in England. At his adult height of 5ft 7 ¾ in, E.M. was the shortest of the brothers and the liveliest. His love of cricket manifested itself from an early age. Local lore had it that he was spotted staggering towards the West Gloucestershire ground clutching a full-sized bat before his first birthday, which sounds like another tall story dreamt up for seekers after Grace myths.

Whatever the truth, he certainly practised when young with a bat that was too big for him – the cause of his unorthodox batting style. He did not play straight but hit most deliveries to leg with a cross bat, and continued to do so as an adult. At school he owned his own set of stumps, presumably a gift from a father delighted that his third son should be as passionate about cricket as himself. If events were going against him E.M. would simply hurl himself over the stumps and refuse to allow the game to proceed. While he never went that far in later life, he was always a fierce competitor who hated to lose.

He developed into a great all-rounder – a brilliant batsman, a shrewd and effective bowler and, by general consent, the best fielder in England, always at point, his speed, athleticism and eye making a lethal combination. There were numerous stories of him appearing to pick the ball almost off the face of the bat. One such victim was Surrey’s Bobby Abel, who cut a ball from W.G. with a full swing of the bat and started running up the wicket. No one else moved, and W.G. roared ‘Where’s the ball?’ E.M. calmly fished it out of his pocket and Abel was given out caught, although nobody had seen E.M. catch him. Similarly, in a match at Clifton College, E.M. stopped a rocket of a shot, turned and pointed towards the boundary. Cover-point ran off in that direction while the batsman started off up the wicket. At that, E.M. strolled up to the stumps, ball in hand, knocked off a bail and ran him out.

His MCC biography described him as ‘one of the most successful batsmen that ever appeared, and the rapidity with which he can score is something marvellous, being a tremedous hitter … Is overflowing with cricket at every pore, full of lusty life, cheerily gay, with energy inexhaustible.’

The story of his first appearance in the celebrated Canterbury week in 1862 gives a flavour of the man. Still only twenty, he was acquiring a considerable reputation and the Kent secretary, his side being a man short, asked Dr and Mrs Grace, who were in town for the cricket, if E.M. would make up the eleven. Dr Grace consented on condition the young man was asked to play in two matches. Summoned to Canterbury by telegraph, E.M. arrived on the second day of the first game but made a duck. In the second innings, he made up for it with 56 not out.

When he was invited to play for MCC against Gentlemen of Kent in the next match a row broke out, some of the Kent players objecting to the fact that E.M. was not an MCC member, to Dr Grace’s ire. The Kent secretary, who was away from the ground when the complaint was aired, returned and confirmed the arrangement. So E.M. guested for MCC and made the Kentish men pay for their punctiliousness. Opening the innings, he carried his bat for a superb 192 not out and demolished Kent with the ball in their second innings, taking all ten wickets. Earl Sefton, President of MCC, presented him with a bat and the Hon. Spencer Ponsonby sent him a ball mounted on an inscribed stand commemorating his feat. There is no record of what the Gentlemen of Kent thought of it all, but the episode typified E.M’s fiery nature: if any man tried to do him down, he responded explosively. It is not hard to imagine what an influence such a larger-than-life character must have had on the young W.G., seven years his junior.

E.M. toured Australia with George Parr’s team in 1863/64 although he did not do himself justice there, mainly because of an injured hand. He played once for England, in the historic first Test match in England, against Australia at The Oval in 1880. He was by then thirty-nine years old and would undoubtedly have played far more often for his country had Test cricket existed while he was in his prime.

He qualified as a doctor in 1861 – one of the examiners wrote, ‘Dr Grace is requested not to write with a stump’ – and first practised at Marshfield before moving two years later to the village of Thornbury, twelve miles from Downend, where he was to remain for the rest of his life. Like his brothers, he was deeply involved in the life of the community: he too was surgeon to the local workhouse, parish medical officer and public vaccinator. He was also Registrar of Births and Deaths, and Coroner for East Gloucestershire from 1875, and known to the cricketing press and public as ‘The Coroner’.

He was quick to take offence at a slight, real or imagined. Playing for Gloucestershire against Somerset in the 1890s, he batted with a badly damaged thumb which was further injured by deliveries from the Somerset bowler Sammy Woods. As play was held up while he was being treated, a spectator shouted, ‘Why don’t you hold an inquest on him?’ E.M. muttered, ‘I can’t stand this’ and headed off in the heckler’s direction to exact retribution. Seeing him approaching, the man ran off, with E.M. pursuing him all the way to the gate. Then he returned to the wicket and completed an innings of 70.

On another occasion, he was batting with W.G. and both were scoring very slowly, unusually for them as both liked to get on with it whenever possible. The crowd began to barrack them, and their criticism intensified as the players returned to the pavilion at an interval. Furious, E.M. reached into the crowd and grabbed one of his barrackers. A spirited tussle ensued, and as the man’s friends dragged him away, one of them told E.M. in a deep Gloucestershire accent, ‘Look yer, Crowner, thee canst sit on carpse with twelve men to help tha, but thee cassent sit on a live man.’

The story was told of E.M. playing in an away match for Gloucestershire and receiving a telegram requesting him to return at once to Bristol to hold an inquest. As the county had only eleven players, W.G. advised him to reply, ‘Impossible to come today – please put corpse on ice.’

He bowled both round-arm seamers and tricky under-arm lobs and his impatience extended to batsmen who treated the latter with too much reverence. To one such, in a club match, who was simply blocking and not scoring, he eventually shouted, ‘I’m not bowling for you to play pat-ball. Hit ’em, man!’ The man did so and ran up an impressive score after which E.M., bearing no grudge, congratulated him with the words, ‘If you hadn’t taken my advice, you would have been in still, poking about.’

Like all the Graces, he was a keen huntsman. A boy playing a scratch game of cricket with some friends at Dursley remembered E.M. arriving on the scene with the Berkeley Hunt. Forgetting the chase, he leapt off his horse and joined in the game, promising a shilling to anyone who could bowl or catch him. Nobody did, but they still got their money.

E.M. was heavily involved in non-medical matters too, as chairman of the parish council and school board, the last Mayor of Thornbury (the post was abolished under local government reorganisation), chairman of the local Conservative Party and the Tariff Reform League. As Gloucestershire secretary, he had a near-photographic memory for members’ names and faces, which came in handy as he wandered round the club’s many grounds on match days collecting subscriptions. He was married four times, and fathered eighteen children, thirteen by his first wife and five by his second. He died in 1911, aged sixty-nine, and a huge crowd followed the coffin the twelve miles from Thornbury to the family plot at Downend where he was buried.

Finally, there was Fred. He was the archetypal youngest child, loved by everybody in the family and beyond. However, being the youngest was something of a handicap because by the time he was getting keen and eager to practise on the lawn his two older brothers had married and moved out to different villages, while E.M. was often away playing cricket. For much of the time Fred had to make do with the bootboy’s bowling and his mother’s coaching. An attempt to rope in a nursemaid called Tibbie Jones ended after the poor girl was forced to bowl and field for a day, after which she retired hurt for good. Still, Fred prospered, once he had been persuaded not to bat left-handed, as he wished. Presumably the chief opponent of this was Mrs Grace, and while her prejudice would be disapproved of these days Fred’s subsequent record justified her insistence. ‘He showed promise of excellence at quite as early an age as I did,’ wrote W.G. ‘He was strong for his age and played with a determination worthy of a much older boy.’ (This trait is common among children with much older siblings whom they are desperate to emulate.) He played in his first local match when he was only nine and took thirteen wickets, ten of them clean bowled. By his mid-teens he was known throughout the county and like his brothers grew to be a fine all-rounder, a hard-hitting batsman, a fast round-arm bowler and a brilliant fielder; he too played for England, and studied medicine. But at the age of twenty-nine, he died from pneumonia brought on by a chill, a terrible blow to the family and to the cricket world for he was a handsome, dashing and popular figure.

As Gilbert grew older, his love of the countryside developed and was never to desert him. Fred, being only two-and-a-half years younger, shared his enthusiasms; they were constantly together. They learned how to use a gun, at first shooting at small birds and going on to hares, but the hunt for the latter on one occasion led them into disgrace. To distract the local harriers (the hare hunt), Gilbert, Fred and Uncle Pocock laid a circular trail of aniseed around the district to put off the hounds and leave the field for themselves. Unfortunately for them, when the dogs came round for the third time, suspicion as to the reason started to grow. The two Grace boys legged it, leaving Uncle Pocock to face the music.

Life in Downend and the area between the village and Bristol was not to be a rural idyll for much longer. The Industrial Revolution which had transformed the great cities of the North and Midlands had not bypassed Bristol entirely. In the first half of the nineteenth century its population more than doubled, from 72,000 in 1801 to 166,000 in 1851. The city’s most explosive growth was reserved for the second half, the population more than doubling again to reach 356,000 in 1901. In the latter period, its older industries were redeveloped and a host of new ones arose beside them. The symbol of the new Bristol was Isambard Kingdom Brunel, originally a Londoner who came to Bristol in poor health and in search of cleaner air, and swiftly recovered to mastermind the laying down of the Great Western Railway between Bristol and London, which started operations in 1841. In 1844 the line between Bristol and Birmingham was inaugurated, opening up access to the Midlands and the North for the south-western city, and the same year a line to South Wales was approved. (Incidentally, these new lines were to be a major factor in the spread of professional cricket, bearing the players from one end of the country to another in hitherto unimaginable speed and comfort.) The railways’ gargantuan appetite for iron and coal was partly fed by the mines of the Forest of Dean, where iron production rose from 9,800 tons in 1828 to 170,611 in 1871. From the forest’s coal mines came 100,000 tons in 1800; by 1856, that had risen to 460,000 tons and by the end of the century to more than a million. In 1851, 3,600 people were employed in engineering in the whole of Gloucestershire. Fifty years later there were 7,850 in Bristol alone. Entire new industries were born: non-ferrous metal-bashing, boot- and shoe-making, leather-working and tanning supplied by hides from the rich agricultural land around the city. Figures for the port of Bristol confirm the city’s dynamic growth: between 1850 and 1900 the annual registered net tonnage of ships using it rose from 129,254 tons to 847,632. More significantly, the cargo they unloaded had increased from about 175,000 tons in 1850 to more than 500,000 by the 1870s and topped 1.3 million in 1900.

Most of the city’s industrial and population growth was eastwards, eventually devouring villages like Mangotsfield. The population of Bristol’s eastern area rose from 23,000 in 1801 to 61,000 in 1851. From then until 1901, virtually the exact period that W.G. lived in Downend as a child and a man, the population soared to 177,000. The area accounted for nearly 80 per cent of the city’s nineteenth-century population increase. W.G. grew up, not in a static, unchanging pastoral world, but on the edge of a dynamic, fast-growing industrial landscape, with all the benefits and evils which that world brought with it. Most importantly, as far as he was concerned, there developed a new urban working-class who increasingly looked for sports and pastimes to play or to watch which would give them a break from their grimy, unhealthy and gruelling workplaces. In the latter half of the nineteenth century one game above all caught their imagination – cricket.