WG'S BIRTHDAY PARTY. By David Kynaston. 154pp. Night Watchman Books, 10 Selwyn
Road, New Malden, Surrey KT3 5AT. Pounds 13. - 0 9532360 0 5.
W. G. GRACE. A life. Simon Rae 548pp. Faber. Pounds 20. - 0 571 17855 3.
A hundred years ago this week, the first day of the annual match at Lord's
between the Gentlemen and the Players was fixed to fall on the fiftieth
birthday of W. G. Grace – the captain of the amateur XI, and by an innings
the most important cricketer there had ever been. David Kynaston's elegant
and evocative little book, WG's Birthday Party, first published in 1990, and
reissued now in a "Centenary Edition", is centred on the events of
this game.
Its account of the play is marvellously vivid, but the special interest of the
book lies in the extended postscript, "After the Party", in which
Kynaston follows the subsequent fortunes, not just of Grace, but of all the
cricketers involved. There are some strange tales – Bobby Abel, Surrey's
insatiable little opener, was forced to go into hiding because he so
resembled Dr Crippen – and a surprising proportion of melancholy ones.
Arthur Shrewsbury, the Players' captain and Grace's choice as the best
opening partner, was tormented by his own baldness, and declined into
hypochondria and suicide; Andrew Stoddart, Grace's sunny vice-captain,
suffered latterly from poor nerves, financial problems and a loveless
marriage, and shot himself in Maida Vale; "Band-Box" Brockwell,
the great dandy among the professionals, ended his days roaming Richmond
Park for firewood, where a drenching thunderstorm brought on his final
illness.
These affecting miniature biographies of Kynaston's are akin to the vignettes
of three or four pages in which writers of an older school, like R. C. Robertson-Glasgow,
would celebrate cricketing personalities. Such a treatment would do for
most, but it can clearly not encompass Grace: who came, initially by his
supremacy on the pitch (he had scored fifty hundreds before other batsmen of
England had scored a hundred hundreds between them; and even in his second
suit as a bowler, though he subsided from "modest medium-pace" to
gentle leg-breaks, he took more wickets than anyone else in the nineteenth
century), then by the intimidating bulk of his person, and finally by the
inexhaustible length of his career, to make the game in effect his own
domain. There have, accordingly, been umpteen full-scale biographies, the
most recent of them published only last year (Robert Low's W. G.); but in
its scale and in the minute thoroughness of its research, as well as in the
fittingness of its amiable, unpretentious prose, Simon Rae's monumental W.
G. Grace: A life outdoes them all. It may even be the biggest book ever
written about anyone who was so exclusively a sportsman.
And readers will soon be clear, for all the social history it takes in on its
way, that this is a cricket book. There are a great many scores and figures.
Grace lived for sixty-seven years, but only in the last forty pages of this
long Life is he not playing cricket (and then he is captaining England at
bowls). Sir Colin Cowdrey has described the slightly chilly realization,
which came to him towards the end of his career, that he had been "standing
at first slip for twenty-five years". Grace stood at the (now rare)
position of point through forty-two years of first-class cricket, and while
he was there seems scarcely to have suffered an uncricketing thought. In
Rae's account, everything else is marginal to the game. Grace's wife Agnes,
for instance, is generally invisible: she only features - and then as part
of a large group - in one of over thirty illustrations; and she looms no
larger in the index than (say) Tom Richardson, the Surrey and England fast
bowler. As for Grace's duties as a GP - and it took him twelve years to
qualify: he seems to have honoured them during the off-season, but through
the summer they were only another source of changing-room jokes, like the
one about the difficult confinement ("it was fairly successful. The
child died and the mother died, but I saved the father").
This makes Grace seem an uncomplicated, even a childish man; and the aptest
introduction to his character is still the opening of Bernard Darwin's
personal memoir of 1934:
"W. G.", said an old friend of his, "was just a great big
schoolboy in everything he did." . . . He had all the schoolboy's love
for elementary and boisterous jokes: his distaste for learning; his
desperate and undisguised keenness; his guilelessness and his guile; his
occasional pettishness and pettiness; his endless power of recovering his
good spirits.
Rae's volume illustrates this larky immaturity with a charming sequence of
photographs from the Hastings festival of 1901: Grace, at fifty-three, is
pretending to cry on the shoulder of the Kent captain, J. R. Mason, while
Lord Hawke looks on with fine distaste.
Grace was born in Bristol in 1848, the fourth of the sons of a cricketing
country doctor, three of whom – the others were E. M., "The
Coroner", himself one of the finest of mid-Victorian cricketers, and G.
F., the unfortunate Fred, who died in 1880, aged twenty-nine, of pneumonia –
went on to play Test cricket. But there was no such thing even as regular
county cricket when their mother Martha taught the boys the rudiments of
batsmanship in their orchard garden. Rae is an excellent guide to the raw
state of the game - its dubious laws, coarse wickets, ill-assorted fixtures
and commercial infancy - that prevailed before the Grace revolution. Overarm
(rather than round-arm) bowling was only legalized in 1865, the year before
W. G. made his first-class debut (for "South Wales"). Demeaning
mismatches and "odds" matches were the norm, and betting was the
motor. An essay "On Cricket" published in 1868, which Rae
attributes to Anthony Trollope, bemoans "the so-called England Elevens,
which go caravaning about the country playing against two bowlers and twenty
duffers for the benefit of some enterprising publican". That was the
year Grace announced himself with 134 not out out of 201, and ten wickets
for eighty-one, in the match at Lord's for the Gentlemen against the
Players. A hero had arrived, and cricket had to reform itself if it was to
support his exploits.
The "Golden Age" was thirty years away, but Grace was shortly
presiding over an age of brass.
W. G., though not of the top order socially, was on the gentlemen's side of
the fault that divided English cricket then and for many decades to follow. (Kynaston
cites the famous entry from a fixture list of 1890, in which a
Leicestershire professional found himself in exalted company: "Cambridge
University versus Gentlemen of England, with Pougher.") It was vital
for the MCC, the game's governing body, that Grace, the nonpareil of
cricketers, should stay under their aegis, rather than throwing in his lot
with the (mostly Northern) professionals; and he exploited their dependency
by ignoring their posture on remuneration: "that no gentleman ought to
make a profit by his services in the cricket field". Ostensibly an
amateur, Grace made between twice and ten times as much as his professional
team-mates through "expenses" and "appearance fees"; and
if he could simply bat through resentment of this at home, it made him –
coupled with an "unfortunate infirmity of temper" – an unpopular
tourist.
In fact, the first of Grace's four tours, to Canada and the United States in 1872–3,
was a happy affair, perhaps because this was an all-amateur party, perhaps
because someone else was captain. The King of Batting was none the less in
demand as a public speaker, despite his high, squeaky voice (on account of
which he once had a proposal of marriage rejected). To meet this challenge,
he patented an adaptable little speech: "Gentlemen, I beg to thank you
for the honour you have done me; I never saw better bowling than I have seen
today, and I hope to see as good wherever I go." To the delight of his
fellow tourists, Grace repeated this almost verbatim at every venue, simply
substituting for "bowling" whichever noun was appropriate (at
Hoboken it was "oysters").
But his tours to Australia, in 1873–4 and 1892–3, won him no friends. His own
side were angered by the terms struck by their captain; in the latter case,
a fee of Pounds 3,000 (Pounds 140,000 in today's terms) plus expenses for
his wife and two children, while his professionals got Pounds 300 each. The
colonials, for their part, disliked the way Grace and his fellow amateurs
shunned their team-mates socially, not allowing them "to come between
the wind and their nobility"; they took additional offence at several
instances of "sharp practice" on the pitch.
But the bitter (and ironic) predictions of Grace's Australian hosts that "his
name will become a synonym for mean cunning and fraud" did not affect
his reputation in England. Indeed, the longer he played, the more awe and
affection his name commanded. In 1895, at the age of forty-six, Grace should
have been in his sporting dotage: but now he became the first man ever to
score 1,000 runs in a month of May, passing, in the process, the once
inconceivable landmark a hundred hundreds. He was still playing Test cricket
in his fifties (one of only four players to do so: the others are Wilfred
Rhodes, George Gunn and the Australian spinner Herbert Ironmonger) and had
the energy and influence to build and run a first-class club from scratch
(London County, at Crystal Palace, wound up in 1905). On his fifty-eighth
birthday (in 1906), in what was still the most prestigious domestic fixture,
he scored 74 for the Gentlemen against the Players, returned to the
pavilion, laid his bat on the table and proclaimed, "There. I shan't
play any more."
And so to the golf course. Certain shocks had impinged on Grace's elephantine
innocence: the deaths of his brother Fred (only a fortnight after his first
Test match - 0, 0, and a brilliant catch); of his daughter Bessie, from
typhoid, in 1899; and his son Bertie, after an appendix operation, in 1905.
But games sustained him through all; and it was only with the onset of the
First World War – and the image it gave him of young men lining up, in his
own phrase, to be "mowed down" – that his heart would begin to
feel its age.
"The Champion", "Leviathan", "The Mammoth", "The
Beard", "The Doctor", "The Old Man": no one was so
garlanded with epithets as Grace. In 1911, his name was on a list of
putative peers drawn up by Prime Minister Asquith, in a move to challenge
the Conservative majority in the House of Lords; but nothing came of it, and
the honour might have seemed superfluous. As Neville Cardus commented:
the very idea of "Sir W. G. Grace" is comical . . . . He was an
institution. As well might we think of Sir Albert Memorial, Sir National
Debt, Sir Harvest Moon – or Sir Cricket!
Others have lodged Grace in English mythology or folklore by comparison to
some other, fictional spirit. To G. K. Chesterton he was, as a creature of
midsummer, a "prodigious Puck"; to a later biographer, A. A.
Thomson, he was like "the jolly Ghost of Christmas Present . . . or the
great Sir John Falstaff". But every encounter with Grace was a strongly
physical experience:
Kynaston reports that he had the dirtiest neck to which one keeper ever kept ("We
Graces ain't no bloody water spaniels!"); and it is Rae's prime
achievement, among many others, to have recovered the bounding human
presence behind the bearded myth. Every reader of his book will have felt
what it was like to have been trapped before the wicket by Grace's lumbering
leg-breaks, and dismissed with a threatening squeak, "Pavilion, you!"
Yet not even a Life as robust as this can take the sentimental, Falstaffian
echo out of Grace's ending, his babbling of green fields while play was
overtaken by deadly earnest. On October 9, 1915, W. G. suffered a stroke in
the garden of his home in south-east London. He was thus bedbound when, four
days later and ten days before he died, the first Zeppelin raids were
launched on the city. These terrified him. A friend tried to cheer him by
appealing to his cricketer's courage: "How can you mind these, W. G.,
you who have played the fastest bowlers of your time (like the Australian
Ernest Jones, who once fired a beamer through his beard)?" "Ah,
but I could see those beggars," came the reply, "I can't see these."
