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