cricketing terms, he also saw Grace as the founder of modern batting, and the man who almost single-handed and ‘by modern scientific method … lifted cricket from a more or less casual pastime into the national institution which it rapidly became’. What are the missing words in that sentence? ‘This pre-Victorian’ – James was infatuated with the notion of Grace springing from a pre-industrial Arcadia and somehow rising above the Victorian hurly-burly to impose his will upon his sport.
While I am convinced by most of James’s elegant proposition, I cannot see Grace as a pre-Victorian, and not only because Victoria had already been Queen for eleven years before he was born. Neville Cardus was surely right to have characterised him as the archetypal Eminent Victorian, perhaps the one public figure who was instantly recognisable to the common man. For my part, the more I have immersed myself in Grace’s life, the more modern he seems to be. The overriding impression he leaves is that he would have been as successful in the late twentieth century as he was in the equivalent period of the nineteenth.
There were always two sides to Grace. He may have been an amateur, in name at least and certainly by nature, but in reality he was the ultimate professional in every respect, almost from the beginning. He was reared to be a cricketer, by a family whose obsession the game was – two of his brothers were among the finest players of the age alongside him, his father helped to shape the game in the West Country and even his mother was devoted to the game and the fortunes of her offspring.
Throughout his long career he earned more money from the game than any of the so-called professionals with whom he played. Indeed, so bitter did they become at this that five of them finally threatened to go on strike over the issue before the Oval Test match of 1896, and two declined to play when their demands were refused. Although much is made of his simultaneous medical career, he was only too glad to abandon it in his early fifties, just when he might have been thought to be about to settle down to the life of a full-time doctor, in order to devote himself entirely to cricket, as secretary-captain of the new London County Club.
Equally, there were two faces of W.G., the cricketer. There is the familiar, bulky figure to which I have already referred and which still dominates our image of him – but there is an altogether different face which, I believe, has become neglected and obscured by the later one. This one is the Grace of his late teens and twenties: a tall, slim, graceful, athletic figure, whose long black beard contained not a fleck of grey and who rewrote the record books in the decade or so between the mid-1860s and mid-1870s. This Grace resembled a fierce young prophet, or a Zionist pioneer. He slightly resembled the young Theodor Herzl, who imposed his own will on a different field of play.
He is as different from the older Grace as the young Botham of 1981 was from the man whose international career was virtually over only a decade later. Incidentally, how Grace would have loved to have played with Botham! And what high jinks that pair might have got up to after play was over for the day. But whereas Botham was effectively finished as a cricketer by his mid-thirties, W.G. went on and on, his career bursting into life again in his late forties like one of those ancient plants that suddenly and unexpectedly produce a glorious flower when it was thought to be incapable of doing so again.
Cricketers who play on well into their forties at the highest level are not unknown in the modern age. One thinks of Cyril Washbrook, gloriously recalled to the England colours at the age of forty-two and responding with 98, of Bill Alley saving his best until the late autumn of his career when he scored more than 3,000 runs in one season (1961), also aged forty-two. In our own era, Graham Gooch is also going strong at forty-three and in 1996 passed W.G.’s mark of 1 first-class centuries. But what distinguishes Grace from anyone else is that he provides a bridge from the old world to the new. In 1863, at the age of fifteen, he played for a Bristol Twenty-Two against William Clarke’s professional circus, long before there was such a thing as a county championship. In 1899, at the age of nearly fifty-one, he was opening the batting for England against Australia with C.B. Fry and matching the arch-Corinthian stroke for stroke, if not in fleetness of foot between the wickets. He played with and against the ageing John Lillywhite in the 1860s and the young Jack Hobbs at the turn of the century.
In between, he rewrote – or perhaps I should say wrote, for there was nothing much before him – the record books. The statistics are awesome. He scored 54,211 first-class runs in a career that lasted an incredible forty-three years, from 1865 to 1908 (the exact number of runs is disputed by cricket statisticians, some of whom appear to have dedicated the best part of their lives to trying to trace every run he scored). Only four batsmen have made more – Jack Hobbs (61,237), Frank Woolley, Percy Hendren and Phil Mead. Of later players, Walter Hammond had a total of 50,551, Herbert Sutcliffe 50,138, Geoffrey Boycott 48,426 and Graham Gooch had accumulated 44,472 by the end of 1996. But statistics tell only part of the story. In the first half of his career, Grace played on pitches which were often atrocious by modern standards, when scores were far lower than they became from the 1880s onwards. In those circumstances, his achievements were remarkable. For instance, in 1871 he scored 2,739 first-class runs, the first man to clear 2,000 in a season.
Compared with Grace in that season, only one other batsman topped 1,000 (Harry Jupp, with 1,068). In 1873, W.G. made 1,805, when nobody else could manage 1,000 (the dogged Jupp failed by 4). In his great year of 1876, W.G. made 2,622, including 839 in eight days, a spell which included two triple-centuries. Nobody had ever managed even one before and only one other batsman scored more than 1,000 that summer. The previous month W.G. had scored 400 not out against twenty-two fielders at Grimsby. Yet nineteen years later, in 1895, he was still good enough to become the first batsman to score 1,000 first-class runs in May and to rattle up 2,346 runs in the season. How many might he have scored on the shirt-front wickets of modern times, or if he had toured abroad more than three times (twice to Australia, once to Canada and the USA)?
He also made more than 45,000 runs in club and other minor fixtures. Did he score more than 100,000 runs in all forms of cricket? Some believe he falls short of the magic figure by a tantalising few but, just as I like to think of Mallory and Irving disappearing into the clouds just short of the summit of Everest but getting to the top before perishing on the way down, so I like to think of W.G. having reached his 100,000, despite what the dry race of statisticians says.
He was a highly effective bowler, taking 2,808 first-class wickets, first as a brisk round-arm seamer, then slowing down with age to become a purveyor of gentle leg-breaks which lured successive generations of batsmen to a destruction they all thought impossible against such soft stuff – and he diddled out a further 4,500 or so in minor cricket. But statistics, while imposing, tell less than half the story. For W.G. was cricket for the Victorian public, the most recognisable face in the country along with Gladstone (Monsignor Ronald Knox playfully suggested they were one and the same person).
His participation in a match was guaranteed to add thousands to the gate. If the news spread round London that he was batting at Lord’s or The Oval, offices would empty and the cabs stream up the roads to St John’s Wood or Kennington. If he was playing at Trent Bridge, Old Trafford or Sheffield, the workers would leave factory or furnace to walk miles for a sight of him batting. And how rarely would he let them down. Of plain country stock himself, he had an instinctive empathy with the common man. The spontaneous displays of affection, the crowds spilling over the ropes to chase him to the pavilion at the end of a great innings, or merely the day’s play, were evidence of his huge popularity. Twice national testimonials were organised on his behalf, once by the MCC, once by the Daily Telegraph, and on both occasions the public was unstinting in its generosity to a man who had already done well out of the game financially, although he was never one to turn down money.
This sense of comradeship with ordinary people was most marked in his work as a doctor in Bristol. There are many stories of his kindness to poor people, of his little gifts to those in trouble and his efforts to get them help or work. But he was no saint: he had a violent temper, which it was easy to provoke. In 1889 he battered a youth with a cricket stump after the lad had the temerity to ignore W.G.’s orders not to practise on the new county ground at Bristol, and was fortunate to escape legal proceedings. In the event, an apology was enough to settle the matter. He had to apologise in similar fashion to settle a huge row with the Australian touring side of 1878 whom he had outraged by kidnapping