Krakatoa was something else
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| Krakatoa during its 1883 eruption |
I say it is generally people who make history, but there are exceptions, of course.
These would include anything done by an animal without human direction. A classic example of that, if it were true, would be the story of Lupa, without whom there would have been no Roman Empire. Then there are things done by inanimate objects. What was the most famous apple in history? It has to be the one Isaac Newton saw as it fell near where he was sitting. More often, though, the exceptions arise from natural phenomena like hurricanes and tsunamis.
Perhaps the most historic of all non-human events occurred in Java at 10:02 am (local time) on Monday, 27 August 1883. It was 04:02 in Britain, as we're six hours behind Jakarta, so the greatest cricketer of all time was probably still fast asleep. Later that morning, after his breakfast, he walked onto the field at Clifton College to open the innings for Gloucestershire against Lancashire, and he scored 112 before he was caught and bowled by Frank Taylor.
So, if you've ever wondered what WG was doing when Krakatoa went BANG!!, now you know.
And so was WG
As far as history goes, Krakatoa certainly was something else. And so, in cricket, was William Gilbert Grace.
As I said, biography presents inevitable focus as its particular challenge, and here I'm taking on the big man himself, the most gargantuan character in all of cricket history, the leviathan.
Now, your typical blog edition is really just an article in size terms—perhaps 25kb in all. The best biography of WG is the one by Simon Rae, published in 1998, and simply called W. G. Grace. It runs to 492 pages of narrative, plus the extras like preface, statistical summary, bibliography, and index. That's a bit more than 25kb!
So, if I allow myself around 25kb to write about WG, what can I do? Well, he had a life outside cricket, so let's think about that, and keep first-class cricket in the background. Here goes.
The Graces and the Pococks
For starters, there was WG's family and his early years, which together gave substance to WG's own view that he was not "born a cricketer", but he was born "in the atmosphere of cricket".
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| Henry and Martha Grace—WG's parents |
He was baptised at the local church on 8 August. In 1850, when he was two, the family removed from Downend House to a nearby property called The Chesnuts which remained the family home until WG's generation were all gone. Downend is near Mangotsfield and was, in 1848, about four miles from the outer fringes of Bristol. WG grew up in open countryside as Downend is another (like Islington) of those many places in England which echo the oft-heard nostalgic lament that "it were all fields round here". And so it was in the 19th century, but not any more—it's a suburb of Bristol. Downend House is still there but The Chesnuts is long gone, and its site is occupied by (splat!) a supermarket.
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| Fred Grace |
Although he was always widely known by his initials, it is believed that his mother called him Willie and the rest of the family called him Gilbert. He had three older brothers, including the formidable "EM" (Edward Mills Grace, who was always called Ted in the family; 1841–1911), and four older sisters who were called Annie, Fanny, Alice, and Blanche.
The youngest was the talented but tragic Fred (1850–1880). The combination of EM, WG and Fred made Gloucestershire the best county team in England through most of the 1870s, a status that the club lost in the aftermath of Fred's early death in 1880, and has never since recovered. It was said of Fred in terms of Gloucestershire's decline that "the county was never the same without him". WG's other two brothers, Henry (1833–1895) and Alfred (1840–1916), also played cricket—but not for long, as their medical careers took precedence.
The orchard
The Chesnuts had an orchard, and cricket-loving Henry Grace, aided by his brother-in-law Alfred Pocock, had it cleared to create what became arguably the world's most famous practice pitch. WG's father Henry was a good organiser but, crucially, his uncle Alfred was an adept coach. The role of Martha cannot be understated either, as she provided the driving force and the motivation to the extent that all nine children, and their dogs, played cricket in the former orchard. The girls and the dogs were there only to field, it must be said!
WG claimed that Martha "knew how to play as well as any of them". He says at the start of his ghost-written work Cricket: "Respect for the truth prevents me from saying I played the first year of my existence, but I have little hesitation in declaring that I handled bat and ball before the end of my second".
Cricket may not have been in his blood, but it was always just outside the door at home. He learned how to bat and bowl in the orchard and he developed another skill nearby. Living in the country and to help local farmers, one of his pastimes was throwing stones at crows in the fields, and he always maintained that this was how he became a good thrower of the cricket ball.
A littler bat
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| Tom Emmett |
WG and Fred had the same coaching and were equally talented. The difference between them was that WG was much more competitive with greater powers of concentration, and could play a long innings to amass a large score. Fred was unquestionably a top-class player, but he understandably did not have WG's level of resolve.
Years later, that great Yorkshire character Tom Emmett would ruefully comment that WG ought to be made to play with "a littler bat". I wonder if he actually knew that Uncle Pocock had agreed with him?
A competitive streak
Besides being taught the skills of the game, the Grace brothers were exhorted to be competitive and to achieve excellence. WG definitely achieved top marks in both disciplines for, as well as the excellence of his achievements, he was probably the most competitive player that ever strode onto a cricket field. The importance of this competitive streak that was shared by WG and his brothers cannot be understated. The Graces always played in a noisy, perhaps boisterous, atmosphere with incessant talking and shouting. It was not only encouragement but also something that the Victorians called "chaffing" and this, being "the act of mocking, teasing, or jesting in a good-natured way", was somewhere between banter and the modern blight of so-called "sledging" (i.e., being childish and stupid), but far closer to banter than to the other. Having always played like this among themselves, the Grace brothers carried it forward into first-class cricket and, whenever EM and WG were batting or fielding together, they hardly ever kept quiet (Fred seems to have been less demonstrative by nature). It was all part of what we now call gamesmanship and its purpose was to distract the opposition. Gamesmanship and money-making went hand in hand where EM and WG were concerned.
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| Wilfred Rhodes in 1900 |
It is interesting that WG's last Test match was Wilfred Rhodes' first. Except that Wilfred was an honest professional, WG had much more in common with Wilfred than he had with any amateur; not least that they were, with Gary Sobers, two of the three greatest all-rounders of all time. Oh, and received wisdom is that Wilfred always played to win, too!
The question is how far you go in your determination to win if you find that the opposition is a tough nut to crack: do you just try harder; or do you act in a way that pushes the rules and the spirit of the game to breaking point; or do you actually cheat? There were times, especially in matches against Australian teams, when it could be said that WG went Beyond a Boundary, so to speak (that's a brilliant book, by the way), and certainly the Australians thought so. This intense competitiveness and determination to win, perhaps not at ALL costs, was instilled into him and his brothers in the orchard at "The Chesnuts" by a team of three very determined individuals: his father, his mother, and his uncle.
The local club
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West Gloucestershire Cricket Club at Knowle Park, Almondsbury in July 1866. Back row (L to R): Rev. H. W. Barber, Dr H. M. Grace, H. Grunning, Alfred Pocock. Middle row (L to R): W. G. Grace, Henry Grace, E. M. Grace, Alfred Grace. Front row (L to R): F. Baker, W. J. Pocock, Fred Grace, R. Brotherhood. Five brothers and their uncle all in the same team. WG was then 18 and already a star player; but no beard yet. |
In order to be competitive, you have to be involved in matches, and the brothers played for a local club in which their father and uncle were keenly involved. In 1845, three years before WG was born, Henry Grace founded Mangotsfield Cricket Club which, a year later, was merged into West Gloucestershire Cricket Club. All five Grace brothers joined West Gloucestershire and played for its team. Simon Rae commented that the Graces "ran the West Gloucestershire almost as a private club". Given their flair for organisation and promotion, that is surely fair comment. The outstanding club team in the West Country was Lansdown in Bath, and the Graces challenged Lansdown when possible, but West Gloucestershire came off second best. On the "if you can't beat 'em" principle, Henry Grace and Alfred Pocock decided to join Lansdown, but they continued to run West Gloucestershire as their primary club.
Up in the morning and out to school
Discussing WG's school days, Simon Rae described him as "notoriously unscholarly". Even so, WG did have an education, and he eventually qualified as a physician and medical practitioner. His actual qualifications, gained in 1879 when he was 31, were Membership of the Royal College of Surgeons (MCRS) and Licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians (LCRP).
He first attended school in Downend with a teacher called Miss Trotman, and was then taught in nearby Winterbourne by a Mr Curtis. It's not clear when he was at these two schools but his third was a place called Ridgway House, and he was there until 1863 when he was 14 going on 15. WG was taken seriously ill with pneumonia and his father withdrew him from Ridgway. When he recovered his health, two things happened. One was that he shot up to his full height of 6 ft 2 in, and the other was that his education continued at home.
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| WG with Agnes, c.1900 |
WG himself was married on 9 October 1873 to Agnes Nicholls Day (1853–1930), who was his first cousin once removed. Their honeymoon was the 1873–74 tour of Australia, and Agnes was six months pregnant when they returned in May 1874. They had four children, but lost their only daughter Bessie, aged 20, to typhoid in 1899; and their eldest son William Gilbert junior, aged 30, to appendicitis in 1905.
Marriage did not place much distance between the family members as, until WG and Agnes moved to London in 1900, they all stayed in Gloucestershire (the four sisters all in Downend), and Rae compared them with Tom Brown's family in Tom Brown's Schooldays as they were "constantly visiting each other".
The Doctor
Regardless of how good a cricketer he became, WG was destined for a career in medicine, like his father and his elder brothers before him. He received overtures from both the Oxford and Cambridge universities. Oxford tried to win him over when he played a match there in 1866. Cambridge tried a more subtle approach in 1868 when Caius College approached him, carefully chosen because of its medical reputation. The Oxford and Cambridge cricket clubs were very strong in the days of what Derek Birley called the "Amateur Ambuscade". If one of them had managed to sign WG, and then perhaps Fred as well, they could easily have been fielding the best team in England.
Henry Grace, however, would not allow his sons to go to university, and WG began his medical studies in October 1868, when he was 20, by enrolling at Bristol Medical School. He later studied in London at St Bartholomew's Hospital and Westminster Hospital Medical School. He was a late qualifier because so much of his time had been taken up by his cricket career. He seems to have become a good doctor, however. He set up a practice in Easton, one of the poorer areas of Bristol, employing locums during the cricket season, and when he went on a winter tour. Although WG was notorious for his unscrupulous money-making in cricket, he was the opposite in medicine as there are plenty of testimonies from poor families which confirm that "his bills would never arrive".
WG practised at Easton until he and Agnes left Gloucestershire in 1900 to live at Mottingham in south-east London, where he died on 23 October 1915.
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