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