William Gilbert Grace

English cricket player

• Born: July 18, 1848
• Birthplace: Downend, Gloucestershire, England
• Died: October 23, 1915
• Place of death: Mottingham, London, England

Grace’s brilliance as a cricket player, coupled with his immense personal popularity, consolidated cricket’s position as England’s national game. He became a symbol of the manly competitiveness that Victorians regarded as an essential element in the British character.

Early Life

William Gilbert Grace was born in a village a few miles from Bristol, England. He came from a cricketing family: His father, Henry M. Grace, a doctor, was captain of a local team, and his mother, Martha Pocock, was also devoted to the game. Both parents coached Grace and his brothers (two of whom also became famous players), and there was constant practicing in the orchard next to their house, with the family’s dogs helping with the fielding.

Grace received a few years of education at private schools in nearby villages, but cricket always meant more to him than his studies. He was good enough to play in adult matches at the age of ten, and at the age of fourteen, he made more than fifty runs against the Somerset County XI, also distinguishing himself as a bowler in the same match. He played against the All-England XI (a powerful team of itinerant professionals) in that same year. By 1864, he was well enough known to be selected for major matches outside the Bristol area, and he made his first big score, 170 runs, at the Oval ground in London. Two years later, he had an even bigger innings—224 not out for the Rest of England against Surrey—that confirmed his reputation as the finest English batsman of his day.

A large man—six feet, two inches tall and powerfully built—Grace was a superb all-round athlete. He excelled in all aspects of cricket. Besides being the greatest of English batsmen, he was also a fine bowler—fast in his youth, later turning to deceptive slow spin bowling—and a brilliant fielder with a magnificent throwing arm and huge hands that made breathtaking catches at point-blank range. As a young man, he regularly competed at athletics meetings, once being given temporary leave from an important cricket match at Lord’s ground to run in a 440-yard hurdles race, which he duly won, at the Crystal Palace track. As a teenager, he was clean-shaven, but in his twenties he grew the massive black beard that made him instantly recognizable wherever he went.

Life’s Work

Grace did more than anyone else to transform cricket from the relatively primitive stage that it had reached when he burst on the scene into something close to its modern form. Until the 1860’s, cricket had been dominated for many years by two professional touring clubs—the All England XI and the United England XI—which played exhibition games against local teams. By the mid-1860’s, however, county clubs containing a mixture of amateurs (“Gentlemen”) and professionals (“Players”) were growing in both strength and popularity. In 1873, the County Championship, a league of nine teams (by the end of Grace’s career the number had grown to sixteen), was formed to meet the public appetite for more competitive cricket. Increased opportunities for leisure activities for both the middle and working classes, improved communications following the development of the railway, and widespread newspaper publicity combined to make cricket an extremely popular spectator sport.

Grace dominated the County Championship in its early years as no player since his time has ever done. His brilliant batting and astute leadership enabled his county, Gloucestershire, to win the championship four times in the first eight seasons. Year after year, he headed the national batting averages, sometimes with an average more than double that of his nearest rival, making light of the rough and physically dangerous conditions of many of the grounds on which he played. Before this time, an individual score of more than one hundred was almost unheard-of; Grace made it commonplace, occasionally going on to score a double or even a triple century. Crowds flocked to see him, the county clubs prospered financially, and no benefit game for a needy professional was complete without him.

Although Grace’s career flowered before the beginning of regular international cricket, he played a major role in promoting the game’s popularity in other countries. He was one of a team that toured the United States and Canada in 1872, he took part in two tours of Australia, and, when the regular series between England and Australia began during the 1880’s, he was an automatic first choice for the England team. By then, he was devoting a bit less time to the game. In 1873, he married Agnes Nicholls Day, and during the next few years, he qualified as a doctor at Bristol Medical School and two London hospitals, St. Bartholemew’s and Westminster.

Grace still captained England in five series against Australia, winning four of them, and continued to represent his country until he was past fifty. Many of his greatest triumphs occurred in the annual exhibition matches between the Gentlemen and the Players (the amateurs against the professionals). Before 1864, the Players had won twenty-two of the previous twenty-five games; from 1867, the Gentlemen were victorious in seventeen of the next twenty-five, several of which Grace won almost single-handedly.

Grace’s dominance was founded on two things: technical mastery and power of personality. His contribution to batting technique was thus described by the great Indian batsman, K. S. Ranjitsinghi:

He revolutionized batting. He turned it from an accomplishment into a science.… What W. G. did was to unite in his mighty self all the good points of all the good players, and to make utility the criterion of style. He founded the modern theory of batting.

Great physical strength, superb coordination, high technical skill, immense powers of concentration, and a certain ruthlessness: That was the formula that made “W. G.” (as he was known to legions of admirers) and led one despairing opponent to declare that he ought to be made to play with a smaller bat.

Assessments of Grace’s personality are more ambiguous. The crowds adored him, and those who knew him well thought him a genial, straightforward person, with a genuinely kind heart. However, from some of the stories told about him it may seem surprising that he was a folk hero to followers of a game in which fair play and good sportsmanship were (and are) prized above all else. His high-pitched voice (another curious feature of so huge a man) was often raised in arguments with umpires, and he was said to “talk out” opposing batsmen by methods that certainly bordered on the unfair. He never actually went outside the laws, but an old professional once observed that it was wonderful what he could do inside them.

For someone who was ostensibly not paid for playing, Grace also made much money from cricket. There was always a clear distinction between the working-class amateur who played for money and the upper-class amateur who played for the love of the game, but the middle-class Grace seems to have been exempt from this. He always received lavish expenses, and after he began to practice medicine in Bristol in 1879 (with a substitute on call when Grace was away playing cricket), he was the recipient of several generously subscribed testimonial funds, the biggest of them after his spectacularly successful 1895 season. A malicious cartoon by Sir Max Beerbohm depicts the great “amateur” receiving a handsome check, with the funeral of one of his patients in the background. However, the patients do not seem to have complained; when available, Grace was devoted to their welfare, and they could bask in the reflected glory of being treated, at least occasionally, by England’s most famous sportsman.

The year 1895 was Grace’s “golden summer,” in which, at the age of forty-seven, he completely recovered his old form and broke yet more batting records. That season was a brief interruption, however, in a slow and inevitable decline. In 1899, he lost his place on the England team (he had put on so much weight that he could no longer field effectively), and during the same year he broke with Gloucestershire to run his own team, London County, which played a few seasons of exhibition matches. He still appeared in the Gentlemen-Players matches until 1904, played his last first-class match at the age of fifty-eight, and turned out in local club games at Eltham, where he was then living, until 1914. Before the end of his first-class career, he had taken up golf and bowls, achieving some prominence in the latter sport: He was president of the English Bowling Association in 1903 and captained the national team for two seasons.

Grace’s later years were darkened first by the deaths of his daughter in 1898 and his eldest son in 1905, and then by the outbreak of World War I. A patriotic Englishman, Grace wrote to The Sportsman newspaper in August, 1914, urging younger cricketers to volunteer, but soon he was mourning the slaughter of many of them in the carnage of Flanders. He seems to have lost the vitality and zest for life that had been so marked a feature of his character, and after a stroke, he died at Eltham on October 23, 1915.

Significance

William Gilbert Grace was one of the most famous Englishmen of the Victorian Age. His great black-bearded figure, with cricket cap perched over his forehead, was known to millions, more familiar from cartoons in Punch and the sporting press than even the most celebrated statesman or military hero. He captured the public imagination and epitomized the spirit of vigorous, good-natured competition that, its adherents liked to think, was at the heart of the Victorian value system. Cricket was becoming a major ingredient in the cult of “muscular Christianity” instilled into generations of English school-boys; Grace provided the hero figure necessary for that cult’s success.

Grace was also a powerful symbol of national unity. Cricket already differed from other sports in that working-class professionals played alongside aristocratic amateurs, although the latter naturally controlled the organization of the game. Grace was undeniably middle class, but he became immensely popular among people of all classes: Admiration for his heroic deeds was something in which everyone could share. He thus contributed to a sense of English identity transcending class divisions, and indirectly promoted the growing spirit of patriotic nationalism on which mass support for British imperialism was built. Grace created modern cricket, but he also stood high in the ranks of Victorian heroes.

Bibliography

Altham, Harry Suntees, and E. W. Swanton. A History of Cricket. 2 vols. London: Allen & Unwin, 1926, rev. ed., 1962. Volume 1 is a revision of Altham’s older history, published in 1926; volume 2 (by Swanton) covers the period from 1914. A fine, detailed account of cricket history. Altham’s volume is in three parts, the middle one being appropriately entitled “The Age of Grace.”

Arlott, John, ed. The Oxford Companion to World Sports and Games. London: Oxford University Press, 1975. Contains a good, short description of cricket and its history, with illustrations and also a brief entry on Grace.

Darwin, Bernard. W. G. Grace. London: Duckworth, 1934, rev. ed. 1978. Darwin was primarily an expert on golf but also wrote extensively on cricket. This is a short but elegantly written biography, lively and interesting, maintaining a clear narrative line, with lavish illustrations. The best written of the numerous Grace biographies.

Grace, W. G. Cricket. Bristol, England: J. W. Arrowsmith, 1891. Partly autobiographical, partly a history of cricket, with comments on the players Grace knew and the issues confronting the game around 1890. Contains statistics of Grace’s career until that year as well as many interesting anecdotes.

Howat, Gerald M. D. “William Gilbert Grace.” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, edited by H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. The entry on Grace sets out the essential facts of his life and athletic career.

Thomson, Arthur Alexander. The Great Cricketer. London: Hale, 1957. 2d ed. London: Hutchinson, 1968. A competent and thorough narrative of Grace’s career, followed by chapters summarizing his achievements as cricketer, doctor, and “eminent Victorian.” Useful for personal details as well as for the explanation of cricket; Thomson makes some effort to place Grace in historical context.

Trelford, Donald. W. G. Grace. Stroud, England: Sutton, 1998. Concise 128-page biography, recounting Grace’s life and athletic achievements. Includes a bibliography.