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