In 1887 a Scottish whisky merchant called Methven Brownlee mistakenly wrote that WG Grace was educated at Rudgway House school in Gloucestershire. It is easy to imagine how Brownlee might have made this error. Brownlee, a friend of Grace, based his biography on a series of interviews at the great cricketer’s Bristol home. Grace liked a drink, and perhaps after a glass or two of Brownlee’s scotch, he mumbled in his Bristol burr what sounded like “Rudgway” rather than “Ridgway”, the school’s real name.
At first glance Brownlee’s slip hardly seems to matter. “Rudgway” has an agreeably bucolic ring, summoning images of the young Gilbert Grace learning the three Rs with the other Gloucestershire farm lads before heading off to the fields. Grace was, after all, of “pure country strain”, according to the broadcaster John Arlott, and possessed a “simple, almost puerile mind”, according to Marylebone Cricket Club’s official history.
Inconveniently, the real Ridgway House was a far more rigorous institution. Under the school’s headmaster, the Rev Henry Malpas (MA, Oxon), Grace studied maths, classics, English language and literature, engineering, chemistry and French, as well as German, taught by Herr Adelbert Bertelheim. There is no telling whether Grace – whose family had no connection with the land – paid attention in class. But he certainly left Ridgway House at the age of 14 with a better academic grounding than his future friend, the MCC grandee Lord Harris. In an unpublished memoir, Harris recalled how he played so much sport at Eton in the 1860s that he initially failed to get into Oxford. “I rushed back to London to my father & poured out my sorrow to him, but he was as dear as possible & told me not to let it spoil my cricket.”
Harris’s revealing handwritten “reminiscences”, written for his son, are a reminder of how archive sources almost always trump published memoirs as material for a biography. In Grace’s case, it is startling how much original material relating to him has never been consulted. They range from the scrapbooks of Robert Fitzgerald, the literally sex-crazed MCC secretary who ended up in a “lunatic asylum” with tertiary syphilis, to the records of the Poor Law union in Bristol that employed Grace as a medical officer. At the opposite extreme, the digitisation of Victorian newspapers makes it possible to shine a light on the most obscure corners of Grace’s turbulent life; we know, for instance, that he studied German at Ridgway House because every year the Rev Malpas advertised his school’s curriculum in the local Bristol press.
Why does rescuing him from an accumulated debris of misinformation matter? Grace is scarcely mentioned in mainstream histories of 19th-century Britain, with Sir Robert Ensor’s classic Oxford History of England 1870-1914 setting the standard. Ensor mentions Grace only twice: on page one in parentheses, where he notes incorrectly that WG made his first-class debut in 1864 (it was 1865); and on page 165, where Ensor writes inaccurately that Grace “first made cricket watching a popular craze”.
To appreciate why Grace deserves to be taken more seriously, you have to return to the lanky teenager who emerged from Ridgway House. This youth possessed phenomenal powers of concentration and invention when applied to cricket, and especially batting, the subject that consumed him. Any batsman who scores a century knows that the effort is mentally draining. When Grace, rather than his ghostwriters, wrote about the process of batting, in wonderfully lucid prose, he made the enterprise sound as intellectually demanding as writing a novel or composing a symphony. “Great scores at cricket,” he advised schoolboys, “like great work of any kind are, as a rule, the result of years of careful and judicious training and not accidental occurrences.”
Grace’s authority to deliver such a statement rests on a feat that is still hard to believe. On 18 August 1875, at Clifton College, Grace scored the 50th first-class century of his career at the age of barely 27. You have to add up all the centuries scored by the next 13 most prolific batsmen in the same 10-year period to reach Grace’s tally. Furthermore, Grace scored many of his centuries on pitches that were lethally unpredictable. At Lord’s in June 1870, WG scored a century for MCC on a cracked, dry wicket in such seemingly effortless style that the Nottinghamshire Guardian’s reporter thought the pitch had settled down. He was wrong. Next day, the 25-year-old Nottinghamshire batsman George Summers was smashed in the face by a rising ball that MCC’s wicketkeeper thought had hit a stone. The semi-conscious Summers was dragged off the field and died four days later; MCC paid for his tombstone.
WG’s extraordinary performances demand that he is seen as more than just a cricketer because they were accompanied by transcendent, international celebrity. Measuring Grace’s fame is an imprecise science but here is one yardstick. Arriving at Adelaide in 1891 for a speaking tour, the explorer Henry Morton Stanley waited on board to be greeted by his customary welcoming party. Wellwishers rushed the decks and then rushed past Stanley, in their haste to shake the hand of WG at the start of his second Australian cricket tour.
Yet Grace’s misfortune was to be denied the legacy he craved. Unlike Stanley, a shameless self-promoter, Grace had no interest in himself. This is why his ghostwriters found it almost impossible to dredge anecdotes out of him, or check copy for errors. On one occasion, the ghostwritten Grace effusively thanked the cricketer John Wisden for his help on a book when the real WG knew perfectly well that Wisden had died 11 years earlier.
It was a different story when Grace wrote about cricket. He correctly believed that his thoughts on the game merited respect, yet most of his writings were buried in Boy’s Own magazine, or at the back of his two ghostwritten memoirs, or, worst of all, spun off from these books as cheap throwaway editions for sale at railway newsstands. “I must see the bindings before giving my consent, as it must be done nicely or not at all,” Grace complained in vain in 1891 to his publisher, who was about to reissue Grace’s chapters on batting, bowling and fielding as a bargain paperback.
Grace was certainly a victim of intellectual snobbery, because, as the slur about his “almost puerile” mind indicates, cricket’s establishment dismissed him as “unanalytic” (another insult handed down by the cricketing headmaster of Eton). WG was also ignored because his views on how to play the game were so subversive. From the outset, he dismantled orthodox batting shots to make them more effective, blurring the coaching manual distinction between defence and attack. It helps to think of him, just a little, as one of the great Victorian inventors. “When you block,” WG heretically told Boy’s Own’s young readers, “infuse a little power into what you do, and do not be content to stop the ball by simply putting the bat in its way – anyone can do that – but try and score off it too.”
More crudely, WG broke every convention about how to behave on a cricket field. The newspapers first noticed Grace’s foul temper in his breakthrough innings at Hove in July 1864, when to his “great annoyance” he chopped a ball on to his stumps. The 15-year-old Grace stomped off, oblivious to the crowd that was mobbing him. He had screwed up, only scoring 170 when a double century was there for the taking.
It is easy from here to cite Grace’s serial bad behaviour as evidence that he betrayed the chivalrous “spirit” of cricket. As so often with Grace, the story is not so simple, for his tantrums and habit of playing right up against the edge of the rules posed a question about what makes sport exciting.
In the late 1970s another teenage prodigy exhibited the same ferocious disregard for “good” sporting conduct as Grace. As he disputed line calls (“You cannot be serious!”), abused match officials (“You guys are the absolute pits of the world”) and occasionally smashed rackets, John McEnroe seemed to be working himself up to an even higher pitch of brilliance. Of course it was terrible behaviour, but would tennis fans have wanted him to tone it down?
WG was the first modern sportsman to ask the same question – most pointedly on 29 August 1882, when he ran out an Australian batsman who had absent-mindedly wandered out of his ground, thinking the ball was dead. According to cricket’s code of honour, Grace should have warned the batsman not to repeat his mistake. Yet he electrified the game, triggering two hours of almost unbearable excitement as the Australians, out for revenge, won the game, prompting a London newspaper to write a mock obituary for English cricket. Without Grace’s alleged “cheating”, the Ashes might never have been born.
Still only 34 at that point, Grace was already on the slide. WG’s physical self-destruction is usually blamed on his prodigious overeating, but he was a formidable drinker as well. By the mid-1880s he routinely needed a lunchtime whisky and soda to fuel him through the afternoon’s play, switching to champagne, wine and whisky chasers at the end of the day. Far from being a jolly giant, he appeared to be coping badly with sustained stress.
One source of pressure may have been the sight of a series of superb younger batsmen surpassing him in the 1880s and 1890s. Two of them, Arthur Shrewsbury and Andrew Stoddart, found their own decline from the heights so intolerable that they blew out their brains. Grace’s compulsive gluttony may also have been a response to acute sorrow at home. He and his wife Agnes, the daughter of a bankrupt lithographer, lost their only daughter Bessie to typhoid at the age of 20 in 1899. This family tragedy seems to have tilted Agnes into long-term depression, made worse by the sudden death of their eldest son Bertie in 1905. “We know what it is to lose those that are dearest to us,” WG wrote shortly afterwards to a recently widowed friend.
Yet through all his grief, Grace continued to play cricket, descending with dignity to humble club level in the suburbs of south-east London. His last season in 1914, when he turned 66, found him as the alarmingly keen captain of Eltham CC’s second XI. WG just wanted a game of cricket. Yet being Grace, he could not help embodying a wider point about why sport matters as a solace for the sorrows and disappointments of life.
“It will be a jolly match, do try and come,” WG wheedled a friend in 1914 as he tried to “get up” a side for a game in Woolwich. At the end of his life, this irascible, inventive, kind and thoughtful man loved cricket so much that he wanted to play for ever.
Amazing Grace: The Man who was WG, by Richard Tomlinson, is published on 3 September by Little, Brown for the 100th anniversary of Grace’s death this autumn. Click here to order a copy for the special price of £20
