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