W. G. Grace

Dr William Gilbert ("WG") Grace, MRCS, LRCP (born 18 July 1848 at Downend, near Bristol; died 23 October 1915 at Mottingham, Kent) was an English amateur cricketer who has been widely acknowledged as the greatest player of all time, especially in terms of his importance to the development of the sport. Universally known as "WG", his initials being a sobriquet, he played first-class cricket for a record-equalling 44 seasons, from 1865 to 1908, during which he captained England, Gloucestershire County Cricket Club, the Gentlemen, MCC, the United South of England Eleven and several other teams.

Right-handed as both batsman and bowler, Grace dominated the sport during his career and left, through his enormous influence and technical innovations, a lasting legacy. An outstanding all-rounder, he excelled at all the essential skills of batting, bowling and fielding, but it is for his batting that he is most renowned as he is held to have invented modern batting. An opening batsman, he was particularly noted for his mastery of all strokes and this level of expertise was said by contemporary reviewers to be unique. He generally captained the teams he played for at all levels and was noted for his tactical acumen. He came from a cricketing family and his brothers Edward (also known by his initials, "EM") and Fred also played Test cricket for England.

Grace was a medical practitioner who qualified in 1879. Because of his profession, he was nominally an amateur cricketer but he is said to have made more money from his cricketing activities than any professional. He was an extremely competitive player and, although he was arguably the most famous celebrity in Victorian England, he was also one of the most controversial on account of his gamesmanship and his financial acumen.

He took part in other sports such as athletics, in which he was a champion 440 yard hurdler, golf, bowls and football, in which he played for the Wanderers.

Early years

Childhood

W G Grace was born in Downend on 18 July 1848 at his parents' home, Downend House, and was baptised at the local church on 8 August. He was called Gilbert in the family circle, except by his mother who called him Willie.

His parents were Henry Mills Grace and Martha (née Pocock), who were married in Bristol on Thursday, 3 November 1831 and lived out their lives at Downend, where his father was the local GP. Downend is near Mangotsfield and, although it is now a suburb of Bristol, it was then "a distinct village surrounded by countryside" and about four miles from Bristol. Henry and Martha Grace had nine children in all: "the same number as Victoria and Albert – and in every respect they were the typical Victorian family". WG was the eighth child in the family; he had three older brothers, including EM, and four older sisters. Only Fred, born in 1850, was younger than WG.

Grace's parents and his uncle Alfred Pocock shared a passionate enthusiasm for cricket. In 1850, when WG was two and Fred was expected, the family moved to a nearby house called "The Chesnuts" which had a sizeable orchard and Henry Grace organised clearance of this to establish a practice pitch that was to become famous throughout the world of cricket. All nine children in the Grace family, including the four daughters, were encouraged to play cricket although the girls, along with the dogs, were required for fielding only. WG claimed that he first handled a cricket bat at the age of two. It was in the Downend orchard and as members of their local cricket clubs that he and his brothers developed their skills, mainly under the tutelage of Alfred Pocock, who was an exceptional coach.

Apart from his cricket and his schooling, Grace lived the life of a country boy and roamed freely with the other village boys. One of his regular activities was stone throwing at birds in the fields and he later claimed that this was the source of his eventual skill as an outfielder.

Education

Grace was "notoriously unscholarly". His first schooling was with a Miss Trotman in Downend village and then with a Mr Curtis of Winterbourne. He subsequently attended a day school called Rudgway House, run by a Mr Malpas, until he was fourteen. One of his schoolmasters, David Barnard, later married Grace's sister Alice. In 1863, following Grace's serious illness with pneumonia, his father removed him from Rudgway House and he continued his education at home where one of his tutors was the Reverend John Dann, who was the Downend parish church curate. Like Mr Barnard before him, Mr Dann became Grace's brother-in-law, marrying Blanche Grace in 1869.

Grace never went to university as his father was intent upon him pursuing a medical career. But Grace was approached by both Oxford University Cricket Club and Cambridge University Cricket Club. In 1866, when he played a match at Oxford, one of the Oxford players, E S Carter, tried to interest him in becoming an undergraduate. Then, in 1868, Grace received overtures from Caius College, Cambridge, which had a long medical tradition. Grace said he would have gone to either Oxford or Cambridge if his father had allowed it. Instead, he enrolled at Bristol Medical School in October 1868, when he was 20.

Style and technique

Grace's approach to cricket

Grace himself had much to say about how to play cricket in his two books Cricket (1891) and Reminiscences (1899), which were both ghost-written. His fundamental opinion was that cricketers are "not born" but must be nurtured to develop their skills through coaching and practice; in his own case, he had achieved his skill through constant practice as a boy at home under the tutelage of his uncle Alfred Pocock.

Although the work ethic was of prime importance in his development, Grace insisted that cricket must also be enjoyable and freely admitted that his family all played in a way that was "noisy and boisterous" with much "chaff" (i.e., a Victorian term for teasing). WG and EM in particular were noted throughout their careers for being noisy and boisterous on the field. They were extremely competitive and always playing to win. Sometimes this went to extremes (e.g., on one occasion at school, EM was so upset about a decision going against him that he went home and took the stumps with him) and developed into the gamesmanship for which EM and WG were always controversial.

It was because of gamesmanship and insistence on his rights, as he saw them, that Grace never enjoyed good relations with Australians in general, though he had personal friends like Billy Midwinter and Billy Murdoch. In 1874, an Australian newspaper wrote: "We in Australia did not take kindly to WG. For so big a man, he is surprisingly tenacious on very small points. We thought him too apt to wrangle in the spirit of a duo-decimo lawyer over small points of the game."

But he was just the same in England and even his long-term friend Lord Harris agreed that "his gamesmanship added to the fund of stories about him". The point was that Grace "approached cricket as if he were fighting a small war" and he was "out to win at all costs". The Australians understood this twenty years later when Joe Darling, touring England for the first time in 1896, said: "We were all told not to trust the Old Man as he was out to win every time and was a great bluffer".

Batting

With regard to Grace's batsmanship, C L R James held that the best analysis of his style and technique was written by another top-class batsman K S Ranjitsinhji in his Jubilee Book of Cricket (co-written with C B Fry). Ranjitsinhji wrote that, by his extraordinary skills, Grace "revolutionised cricket and developed most of the techniques of modern batting". Before him, batsmen would play either forward or back and make a speciality of a certain stroke. Grace "made utility the criterion of style" and incorporated both forward and back play into his repertoire of strokes, favouring only that which was appropriate to the ball being delivered at the moment. In an oft-quoted phrase, Ranjitsinhji said of Grace that "he turned the old one-stringed instrument (i.e., the cricket bat) into a many-chorded lyre". He ended by saying that "the theory of modern batting is in all essentials the result of WG's thinking and working on the game".

But Grace's extraordinary skill had already been recognised very early in his career, especially by the professional bowlers. A very prescient comment was made by the laconic Yorkshire and England fast bowler Tom Emmett who, after playing against Grace for the first time in 1869, called him a "nonsuch" who "ought to be made to play with a littler bat".

H S Altham pointed out that for most of Grace's career, he played on pitches that "the modern schoolboy would consider unfit for a house match" and on grounds without boundaries where every hit including those "into the country" had to be run in full. Rowland Bowen records that 1895, the year of Grace's "Indian Summer", was the season in which marl was first used as a binding agent in the composition of English pitches, its benefit being to ensure "good lasting wickets".

It was through Alfred Pocock's perseverance that Grace had learned to play straight and to develop a sound defence so that he would stop or leave the good deliveries and score off the poor ones. This contrasted him with EM who was "always a hitter" and whose basic defence was not as sound. However, as Grace's skills developed, he became a very powerful hitter himself with a full range of shots and, at his best, would score runs freely. Despite being an all-rounder, Grace was also an opening batsman.

Bowling

Grace originally bowled at a fastish medium pace but in the 1870s he adopted a slower style which utilised a leg break. The chief feature of his bowling was the excellent length which he consistently maintained. He put very little break on the ball, just enough to bring it across from the batsman's legs to the wicket. He was unusual in persisting with a roundarm action throughout his career, when almost all other bowlers adopted the new overarm style.

Fielding

In his prime, Grace was noted for his outstanding fielding and was a very strong thrower of the ball; he was once credited with throwing the cricket ball 122 yards during an athletics event at Eastbourne. He attributed this skill to his country-bred childhood in which stone throwing at crows was a daily exercise. In later life, Grace commented upon a decline in English fielding standards and blamed it on "the falling numbers of country-bred boys who strengthen their arms by throwing stones at birds in the fields".

Much of Grace's success as a bowler was due to his magnificent fielding to his own bowling; as soon as he had delivered the ball he covered so much ground to the left that he made himself into an extra mid-off and he took some extraordinary catches in this way.

In his early career, Grace generally fielded at long-leg or cover-point; later he was usually at point (see Fielding positions in cricket). In his prime, he was a fine thrower, a fast runner and a safe catcher.

Grace's amateur status

At the end of the 1878 season, WG and EM Grace were called to account by the Gloucestershire membership because of expenses they had claimed from Surrey following a controversial match that season, which Surrey had refused to authorise.

The enquiry at Gloucestershire took place in January 1879. WG and EM were forced to answer charges that they had claimed "exorbitant expenses", one of the few times that their money-making activity was seriously challenged. The Graces managed to survive "a protracted and stormy meeting" with EM retaining his key post as club secretary, although he was forced to liaise in future with a new finance committee and abide by stricter rules.

The incident highlighted an ongoing issue about the nominal amateur status of the Grace brothers. The amateur was, by definition, not a professional and the dictum of the amateur-dominated Marylebone Cricket Club was that "a gentleman ought not to make any profit from playing cricket". Like all amateur players, they claimed expenses for travel and accommodation to and from cricket matches, but there is plenty of evidence that the Graces made rather more money by playing than their basic expenses would allow and WG in particular "made more than any professional". However, in his later years he had to pay for a locum tenens to run his medical practice while he was playing cricket and he had a reputation for treating his poorer patients without charging a fee. He was paid a salary for his roles as secretary and manager of the London County club. He was the recipient of two national testimonials. The first was presented to him by Lord Fitzhardinge at Lord's on 22 July 1879 in the form of a marble clock, two bronze ornaments and a cheque for £1,458. The second, collected by MCC, the county of Gloucestershire, the Daily Telegraph and The Sportsman, amounted to £9,703 and was presented to him in 1896 in appreciation of his "Indian Summer" season of 1895.

Whatever criticisms may be made of Grace for making money for himself out of cricket, he was "punctilious in his aid when (professional players) were the beneficiaries". For example, when Alfred Shaw's benefit match in 1879 was ruined by rain, Grace insisted on donating to Shaw the proceeds of another match that had been arranged to support Grace's own testimonial fund. After the same thing happened to Edgar Willsher's benefit match, Grace took a select team to play Kent a few days later, the proceeds all going to Willsher. On another occasion, he altered the date of a Gloucestershire match so that he could travel to Sheffield and take part in a Yorkshire player's benefit match, knowing full well the impact that his appearance would have on the gate. As John Arlott recorded, "it was no uncommon sight to see outside a cricket ground":

CRICKET MATCH
Admission 6d
If W G Grace plays
Admission 1/–

Grace and his brother Fred faced financial difficulty after their father died in December 1871 as they were still living with their mother who had been left just enough to retain the family home. As medical students, they faced considerable outlay in addition to their living expenses and it became imperative for them to make what they could out of cricket, especially the United South of England Eleven. Grace as its match organiser had to find gaps in the first-class fixture list and then pull together a team to visit a location where a suitable profit could be made. It has been estimated that the standard fee paid to the USEE was £100 for a three-day match with £5 each going to the nine professionals in the team and the other £45 to WG and Fred: a sizeable amount in 1872 when £100 was perhaps the equivalent of £3000-plus at the end of the 20th century. Otherwise, Grace played for expenses but these were loaded as, for example, he is known to have claimed £15 per appearance for Gloucestershire and £20 for representing the Gentlemen. Although the money he was paid is "small beer" compared with 21st century sports stars, there is no doubt he had a comfortable living out of cricket and made far more money than any contemporary professional.