in Downend and the area between the village and Bristol was not to be a rural idyll for much longer. The Industrial Revolution which had transformed the great cities of the North and Midlands had not bypassed Bristol entirely. In the first half of the nineteenth century its population more than doubled, from 72,000 in 1801 to 166,000 in 1851. The city’s most explosive growth was reserved for the second half, the population more than doubling again to reach 356,000 in 1901. In the latter period, its older industries were redeveloped and a host of new ones arose beside them. The symbol of the new Bristol was Isambard Kingdom Brunel, originally a Londoner who came to Bristol in poor health and in search of cleaner air, and swiftly recovered to mastermind the laying down of the Great Western Railway between Bristol and London, which started operations in 1841. In 1844 the line between Bristol and Birmingham was inaugurated, opening up access to the Midlands and the North for the south-western city, and the same year a line to South Wales was approved. (Incidentally, these new lines were to be a major factor in the spread of professional cricket, bearing the players from one end of the country to another in hitherto unimaginable speed and comfort.) The railways’ gargantuan appetite for iron and coal was partly fed by the mines of the Forest of Dean, where iron production rose from 9,800 tons in 1828 to 170,611 in 1871. From the forest’s coal mines came 100,000 tons in 1800; by 1856, that had risen to 460,000 tons and by the end of the century to more than a million. In 1851, 3,600 people were employed in engineering in the whole of Gloucestershire. Fifty years later there were 7,850 in Bristol alone. Entire new industries were born: non-ferrous metal-bashing, boot- and shoe-making, leather-working and tanning supplied by hides from the rich agricultural land around the city. Figures for the port of Bristol confirm the city’s dynamic growth: between 1850 and 1900 the annual registered net tonnage of ships using it rose from 129,254 tons to 847,632. More significantly, the cargo they unloaded had increased from about 175,000 tons in 1850 to more than 500,000 by the 1870s and topped 1.3 million in 1900.
Most of the city’s industrial and population growth was eastwards, eventually devouring villages like Mangotsfield. The population of Bristol’s eastern area rose from 23,000 in 1801 to 61,000 in 1851. From then until 1901, virtually the exact period that W.G. lived in Downend as a child and a man, the population soared to 177,000. The area accounted for nearly 80 per cent of the city’s nineteenth-century population increase. W.G. grew up, not in a static, unchanging pastoral world, but on the edge of a dynamic, fast-growing industrial landscape, with all the benefits and evils which that world brought with it. Most importantly, as far as he was concerned, there developed a new urban working-class who increasingly looked for sports and pastimes to play or to watch which would give them a break from their grimy, unhealthy and gruelling workplaces. In the latter half of the nineteenth century one game above all caught their imagination – cricket.
1854–1869
WHAT was the state of cricket in England when Gilbert Grace was a boy in Downend? In the 1850s it was at a crossroads, in between its birth in the previous century as a village game and its development as a national sport in the second half of the nineteenth century, with the county championship at its apex. Several county clubs had been set up (the first was Sussex in 1841) and an informal championship began in 1864. This left large areas of the country where the only cricket was played between village teams such as Dr Grace had set up in Gloucestershire, but there was a growing number of good professionals whom the public were keen to see. In the absence of a proper county championship, how were they to do so? The answer came in the form of touring troupes of the top professionals, of which the first and most notable was the All England Eleven set up by William Clarke in 1846.
It is fitting that W.G.’s first experience of cricket outside the charmed world of The Chestnuts was in 1854, when he was six years old. He was taken to Bristol to see a match between Clarke’s All England team and twenty-two men of West Gloucestershire. The game was organised by his father, who also captained the local team. So the first match seen by the boy who was to be the century’s greatest cricketer involved the man who was the century’s most innovative cricketer until that point.
William Clarke was as significant a figure in his day as Kerry Packer was in ours and with much the same aim: to capitalise on the growing public interest in the game and establish regular employment and a decent market rate for professional cricketers, whose job prospects had hitherto been precarious. The means Clarke devised to do this was to recruit the best cricketers in the country for All England and tour the country playing any local teams who cared to arrange a venue.
A Nottingham man, Clarke was first a bricklayer and then an innkeeper. He first played cricket for the Notts Eleven at the age of eighteen and became well known in the North and Midlands as a slow bowler who delivered leg-breaks from waist height. He had a shrewd eye for business, for a good horse and a good deal: he married the widow of the proprietor of the Trent Bridge Inn and laid the foundations of the Trent Bridge ground by buying and developing the adjoining land. He was a late developer on the national cricket scene: his first appearance at Lord’s, for the North v the South, was in 1836 when he was thirty-seven. Ten years later, he was invited by the Marylebone Cricket Club to come to London as a practice bowler at Lord’s. That year he made a belated debut for the Players v Gentlemen (in which he was to play several more times) and in the 1847 fixture he shared all twenty wickets with John Lillywhite, both matches being played at Lords.
By then, Clarke, ever on the look-out for a good business opportunity, had set up his All England Eleven. As he had predicted, it was a huge success. Invitations came in from all over the country and Clarke’s circus took the cricketing message to places until then starved of top-class cricket, going to remote spots as far afield as Cornwall, Lincolnshire and Ireland, travelling long hours in the most uncomfortable circumstances, by stagecoach if there was no railway line.
The welcome they received everywhere more than made up for the hardship involved. The financial rewards did not, however, and in 1852 several of his professionals departed to set up a rival team, the United All England Eleven, in protest at Clarke’s refusal to pay them a decent wage. Local clubs were required to put up a fee of about £70, yet Clarke, who had a reputation for tight-fistedness, paid his players only £5 each (or a grudging £6 for long journeys) from which he deducted their travelling expenses.
He retained the loyalty of most of his players, however, and for the visit to Bristol he could still muster a formidable Eleven, including some of the greatest names in English cricket: George Parr, ‘the Lion of the North’, another Nottinghamshire man, gritty and determined, a natural leader who took over the All England team from Clarke and led two of the first three overseas tours by English teams; Julius Caesar, whose magnificent name belied both his origins (he came from Goldalming, in rural Surrey), his small stature and his intensely nervous nature, but who was a fine batsman, a great exponent of the drive and the pull; the durable and evergreen Sussex wicketkeeper Thomas Box; William Caffyn, also of Surrey, a talented all-rounder known at The Oval as ‘Terrible Billy’; John Bickley, the Nottinghamshire medium-pace bowler who the previous year had taken 8–23 against England at Lord’s; Edgar ‘Ned’ Willsher, the Kent left-arm opening bowler who eight years later was to write his name in cricket history by being no-balled by John Lillywhite for overarm bowling, which led to its legalisation; and there was Clarke himself, at fifty-six nearing the end of his long career, and his son, Alfred, a capable enough batsman. So superior in ability were Clarke’s men to the local amateurs that they were quite happy to play teams of eighteen or twenty-two, and generally beat them. A visit from Clarke’s Eleven was a great social occasion, eagerly anticipated for months beforehand by a public with an appetite for good cricket that had never previously been served. Special entertainments were devised for the evenings to keep the spectators amused.
The players wore spotted or striped shirts, ties or scarves, white trousers held up with thick belts and round bowler-style hats. They bowled four-ball overs in the round-arm style which had gradually developed in the first half of the century despite fierce opposition from defenders of the