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W. G. Grace – Part 3 – with Richard Tomlinson
18 Plays16 minutes ago
In this final installment of my chat with historian Richard Tomlinson, author of Amazing Grace - The Man Who Was W.G. (2015), we discuss Grace's love of sports outside of cricket, particularly lawn bowls and golf, his colossal statistics with both bat and ball, and his legacy today.
ABOUT RICHARD TOMLINSON:
Richard Tomlinson is a British historian and journalist whose biography of W.G. Grace was published in 2015 on the 100th anniversary of the great cricketer’s death. In Amazing Grace – The Man who was W.G., Richard set Grace’s on-field achievements in the context of his life and times as arguably the most famous celebrity in the English-speaking world.
Presenter & Producer: Tom Ford
DONATE: You can buy Tom Ford a coffee! Every donation helps with production and inspires Tom to keep the podcast going. You can donate from a little as $5. Visit: buymeacoffee.com/GoldenAgeOfCricket
All music used in podcast comes from the University of California Santa Barbara’s remarkable collection of wax cylinder’s from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which are free to download and use. You can donate to the upkeep of these recordings via their website.
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Transcript
Introduction and Donation Invitation
00:00:07
Speaker
Welcome to part three of my discussion with historian Richard Tomlinson, author of the 2015 publication Amazing Grace, The Man Who Was W.G. My name is Tom Ford. If you'd like to make a small donation to the podcast, please visit buymeacoffee.com golden age of cricket.
00:00:28
Speaker
We return now to our discussion about an ageing WG as he contemplates life with other sports. We dissect his enormous statistics and reflect on his legacy today.
WG Grace's Sports Involvement
00:00:40
Speaker
you fla ring a rosy with jim kate joy So you mentioned the yeah you know his inability to give up cricket, but at this point of his career he's also playing he's involved in other sports as well. yeah i mean You've mentioned earlier he was umpiring, refereeing football matches, but he also takes up golf and lawn bowls. To what extent was he successful in these fields as well?
00:01:07
Speaker
Well, he they're both quite interesting, really, because Bowles, he actually started playing ah in Bristol, because there was a Bowles ground, ah I think I'm right, at the end of the Bristol Count of all kind Cricket ground that had Ashley down, and he got he that's where he started playing. But when he moved to Crystal Palace, they they had I think I'm right. There were some tennis courts and Grace being Grace, he wanted to go on playing bowls.
00:01:40
Speaker
and so he persuaded them that this was really a good place to have the bowls club and then it gets more interesting because grace being grace I mean he obviously wants you know a competition ah you know he wants competitive bowls and you know league tables all the rest of it and then you know or something like that and I am not a bowls player so I didn't really get into this in any great detail but there is some problem involving the rules of bowls that he doesn't like about the way it's played in England but he spots that the Scottish Bowls Association has a different set of rules and because this is sort of the game is in its kind of I guess early stages of evolution a bit like cricket half a century before. Grey says well look why don't we go and sort of
00:02:28
Speaker
affiliate with the Scottish Bowls Association and then we can play our own England which is really WG Grace's yeah team versus Scotland and he goes up to Scotland I think a couple of times with his his bowls team in the early 1900s he does other things as well um i I'm not sure if I put it in the book, but there's this is fantastic.
Humorous Scottish Speech
00:02:50
Speaker
On one of these bowls tours, one of the cricket clubs up there in Scotland, he's called the Carlton Cricket Club. Anyway, it's one of the clubs where he had played ah professional games in the early 1870s.
00:03:04
Speaker
And they invite him to give an after dinner speech and he's obviously, yeah, of course I'll come along. And the speech basically is W.G. Grey saying, well, when I was here 20 years ago, I thought you were really promising cricketers, but you're absolutely rubbish you look at the irish and you should should get you should learn something from the art. He's about as ah artlessly insulting as you could possibly be. But he plays, yeah, he plays Bowles. He does captain the England Bowles team. So it's a sort of one of those weird cricket quiz questions. It's a bit like, sort of you know, you know, the classic Everton Weeks question, because I think Everton Weeks represented the West Indies and Barbados at ah ah Bridge, I think it was. And Dungy Grace's Bowles is a bit like that.
00:03:48
Speaker
so that's the bowls and then and he's tremendously keen on it I mean you know you come across these sort of letters he writes to local to there's one down near and Reading where I come from and and he keeps very WG Grace like and he gives very precise instructions about when we're going to arrive on the train you know we're going to have to catch the train back to London at such and such a time so it's all very very organized which is how he likes things.
WG Grace and Golf
00:04:12
Speaker
um The Gulf Well, the Gulf is, for me, quite interesting. Well, it is interesting anyway, because he did play a lot around the in Surrey, South London and other parts of the home counties. um And he's the the classic thing with WG would be there'd be somebody like a sort of newspaper tycoon or somebody who wanted to meet him um and
00:04:38
Speaker
that would be the lure to sort of for him to sort of be whisked off to sort of play a round of golf. And there was one particular golf course, Walton Heath in Surrey, which his friends of mine who play golf say is a very good golf course, and and he played a lot there. The interesting thing is that the some of this was recorded by Bernard Darwin, who was a great golf writer, actually the grandson, I think, of Charles Darwin. and and some of Darwin's observations about Grace on the golf course are very acute about Grace as a sportsman. Darwin couldn't quite bring himself to say this guy's not, you know, this this guy's sort of actually got a very, very serious intellect, but he he could see that Grace sort of somehow understood
00:05:23
Speaker
the sort of what he was trying to do and had a kind of insight into into sport and so some of that writing is very acute. Unfortunately there's also quite a lot of stuff about Grace in Darwin's book on him which which is just wrong because he's taken it from from other writers on cricket which was not a game he particularly followed. So that was the gulf which he played to the end of his life and he was he was you know up for it at any time Yeah, and there's also some in existence photos, ah photographs of him playing golf, which I think were taken by George Beldum, who took the famous photos from the same I should mention, I mean, this is this is perhaps I don't know, this is perhaps the moment to mention Beldum and the whole problem.
Legacy and Imagery of WG Grace
00:06:05
Speaker
with trying to get a fix on just how good grace was because of course we're talking about the golden age and we've talked about his physical decline and part of the problem which actually Mike Atherton pointed out in a review of my book and he made a good point which is that you don't have images of grace um that really do justice to giving you a sense of how great a critic he was and I think I actually felt that he hadn't actually gone far enough in in in making that point, because it's a totally subjective thing. But for instance, if we're talking about Trump power,
00:06:44
Speaker
that great photograph that Beldam took is of course not exactly an action photograph because it it was posed because I'm not technically minded but he just didn't have the sort of the shutter speed or whatever you call it to be able to to show real live action nonetheless it's ah it's ah it's a really great photograph but this is the problem with Grace, which is that you you have nothing, really, apart from those cartoons by Harry Furness, which are really worth looking at. I mean, they're very easy to find on the internet. Those, those to me, are the end and ah the only images that really give you any sense of of Grace playing cricket, because the the the film footage is nothing it's just flickering images at the end, there are a couple of clips added to which there is this absolutely visually disastrous portrait portrait of Grace in the long room, the iconic picture, which was which was painted by Archibald Walkley Stewart in 1890. And the problem with that one is when you look at it, certainly in my case, you look at Grace's batting stance as you think of it, and you think the guy is just going to topple backwards onto his stance.
00:07:55
Speaker
and that's not the trouble was that he couldn't paint grace in the stance that grace was ah about to take to face the bowling because he was just about to crouch with his foot front foot cocked ready to move with the weight on his back foot either forward or back depending on the length of the delivery, which is the whole sort of inventive unorthodoxy of Grace's batting is encapsulated in that image and further Scott nearer than anybody to capturing it, but it was at the end of Grace's career. I've gone off on a tangent, but I think
00:08:35
Speaker
that's sort of quite an important point, which is that you you think of Grace in those terms and you cannot, there are plenty of pictures by Beldam, who was a friend of Grace, of but and Beldam himself took some photos of Grace, so they're great photographs in Crystal Palace Park, but he's they're posed and he's a fat old man basically, so it's not quite the same thing.
00:08:59
Speaker
Yeah and we're talking 1905 so yeah I mean as grateful as we are to have these photos because they are up close of grace in action or at least posing as close to action as possible we would absolutely love to have photos of grace in 1872 exactly the same and with the same technology but unfortunately you know we could say the same about We're very grateful for the photos of Trumper, but we would love some more footage. There's scant footage. I mean, and the footage we have of Trumper is posed and there is footage of him, I think, being run out um at the Sydney cricket ground, which doesn't at all. ah You know, it it doesn't do him justice. But yeah, yeah, again yeah it's um we're left with what we're left with, I suppose.
Cricket's Golden Age Debate
00:09:49
Speaker
um Richard, I mentioned at the top of the podcast about the so-called Golden Age. And, you know, there's debate about, first of all, whether it was a Golden Age. But if yeah if it was, when did it begin? Some think 1890, because that's the start of the county championship. Others think Patrick Mora in his book from the 1860s on the Golden Age actually starts it with Grace's Indian summer in 1895. Yeah.
00:10:18
Speaker
But there's absolutely no question as to when the Golden Age ended and that was with the outbreak of the First World War. Yeah. Obviously, Grace had stopped playing cricket, certainly major cricket at that point, but he dies ah in 1915 and ah his death alongside Andrew Stoddarts and of course Victor Trumpers which is most shockingly of all because he's only 37, is often used as another reason why this is the end of the golden age. yeah I just love to read a passage from your book it comes from page 297 but it's actually
00:11:01
Speaker
a quote from Alfred Gardner, who was the editor of the London Daily News at the time in 1915. And he's he's talking about hearing the news of done WG's death. um And I'm just going to read what he wrote. And he he writes, quote Even in the midst of world-shaking events, it stirred me. For a brief moment, I forgot the war and was back in that cheerful world where we used to be happy, where we greeted the rising sun with light hearts and saw it setting without fear. In that cheerful world, I can hardly recall a time when a big man with a black beard was not my king. I owe more undiluted happiness to him than to any man that ever lived.
00:11:50
Speaker
For he was the genial tyrant in a world that was all sunshine." Not only is that just a beautifully written phrase, a but it really just sort of, you know, it encapsulates what people at that time were thinking. I mean, they're just plunged into this great war. They have, possibly at this point, they're still thinking it'll be over shortly, but it's obviously takes a few more years.
00:12:17
Speaker
But the death of WG Grace is really just the cherry on top of a terrible Sunday. And I mean, just encapsulates everything, don't you think?
00:12:29
Speaker
ah It does. It's it's it's brilliant. um And he really understood cricket guard now. i mean he you know So it that that was why I put it in. The thing I would say, of course, is that that Grace himself, I mean, if you're talking about the Golden Age, if anybody called time on it, it was Grace with this famous letter he wrote in August 1914.
00:12:51
Speaker
to the sportsman. And he you have to imagine that he he he basically said, you've got to stop playing cricket. you know there are There are boys, I mean, you know being slaughtered in France. He didn't quite put it like that. ah But he couldn't abide the thought of watching, because he was almost basically en route his to the all the soldiers marching through Kent ah to to to Dover and Folkestone and the other ports.
00:13:20
Speaker
he saw them go almost past his front door and it it was more than he could bear. um he had a His son Edgar by then was in um the Navy. ah His younger son, Charlie, was working in the phone exchanges in Chatham nearby. And he clearly worried for them as well, but he felt it was just unimaginable that you could go on playing cricket. It didn't actually stop cricket being played. I mean, there were the the first book there were several first-class games that carried on after that. ah So he he called time on it.
00:13:53
Speaker
What I think I loved about Gardner's quote was it got me thinking, I'm not sure if I actually mentioned it in the book, but if you think about a golden age, and it was it was a golden age, um what what did it need? ah What it needed, first of all, you needed to have a sport that was a mass spectator sport, you know, that was something that thousands and thousands, tens of thousands of people in England and Australia and increasingly in other countries, they wanted to go and watch and they wanted to follow in the newspapers. Now, is it possible to imagine such a sport without WG Grace having happened, if you like?
00:14:37
Speaker
And I suppose it is, I mean you can you can think of all the reasons why cricket did emerge in the 1890s as this, actually earlier, the 1870s as this mass spectator sport. But the big box office draw was W.G. Grace. Without W.G. Grace I think it would have been Slower and I think it would have not necessarily have been Quite as exciting because the way this guy played and he set the standard That's the thing that he was the benchmark against which all these other batsmen who followed him pinched themselves So that I would say is the first thing and what you also need you need test cricket you need this this this contest this love-hate relationship and
00:15:30
Speaker
I would say the creation of test cricket it wasn't solely down to W.G. Gross. For me, the three defining founders of test cricket. at WG Grace, his great enemy and sort of friend, Fred Spofforth. And I don't know whether he's popped up in any of your other broadcasts, but an often forgotten bowler called Harry Boyle, who was just absolutely magnificent in the 1882 test. And they created this spectacle together, not only there, but if you take WG Grace away from all of that,
00:16:07
Speaker
it's really very very hard to have a sort of framework that you can sort of see well what what made these these these cricketers the way they were they were playing in a way that was modern you know i know that one looks back on it as a golden age but this is modern sport it's modern mass spectator sport and so it comes back to the thing i was saying at the beginning The correct lens to look at W.G. Grace is is it's
WG Grace's Cricket Statistics
00:16:33
Speaker
his historical, obviously, but the sort of comparisons one comes up with again and again are actually from today, because he's so modern-minded in the way that he he approaches things.
00:16:45
Speaker
Yeah. And we're going to finish this podcast talking about his legacy and where he is today in the whole pantheon of cricket. But before we do that, we're going to, like we do with every podcast, look at the actual numbers. We've already listed off some of his famous scores and totals and things, but let's go through them. And I've actually taken the liberty Richard of, so we're going to talk through his overall first class and test record. Yeah. but I've actually broken it down of his record after 1890, if we take that as the beginning of yeah the Golden Age. So we'll begin with his overall record. um And some of these names are quite famous. So he he played 22 test matches in total, 36 batting innings. He scored a total of 1,098 runs, which might seem low for modern
00:17:40
Speaker
years, but again you need to take it in the historical context. A higher score of 170, he averaged 32.29 with the bat, he scored two centuries, five half centuries, and he took 39 catches.
00:17:57
Speaker
yeah Let's switch to his bowling. So in test cricket, in those 22 matches, um he bowled 666 deliveries. He took nine wickets for a total of 36 runs. His best bowling for an innings was just two for 12. His best bowl for a match was just three for 68. So that speaks to how, what we were saying before about come the golden age, he's really stopped sort of focusing on his bowling I think. um He had a bowling average of 26.22. Now when when we switch to his first class career this is where the numbers get just ridiculously colossal. um So he played 871st class matches um and this is between we have to remind ourselves so his first first class matches in 1865
00:18:50
Speaker
and last plays a first-class match in 1908. Huge fan. um He bats a remarkable 1,478 times. He scores 54,211 runs.
00:19:08
Speaker
a higher score of 344, that iconic score we've mentioned already. He has a first class batting average of 39.45, which again, ah um seems low to modern ears, but at the time was very reasonable. Now this is where it gets, there's a bit of conjecture. So um I think at the time of his retirement, the official number of first class entries was 126, but is it now I think officially, certainly with one body, been reduced to 124. And he scored 251 half centuries and took 876 catches. Which is an important point, by the way, because he was a heck of a fielder as well. Yeah, absolutely. Yes. Yeah. yeah that I mean, they're they're almost numbers you see with the wicket keeper. So 876 catches um in first class cricket with the bowling.
00:20:06
Speaker
in those 870 matches. He bowled a remarkable 124,831 deliveries. to yeah um He took 2,809 wickets and gave away 50,980 runs as a bowler. His best bowling in an innings was 10 for 49, so he took all 10 wickets. yeah And his bowling average was 18.14. And again, to modern ears, that sounds remarkable, but ah we're talking at a time when bowling averages, you know, were quite low. So some bowling averages, George Lohmann, for example, I think it's like 11 in test cricket or something, but it's still very, very good.
00:20:53
Speaker
um And across his first class career, he took five wickets in an innings 240 times, and he took 10 wickets in a match on 64 occasions, just colossal numbers. So now let's break those two down into his career after 1890. And I have to admit, Richard, I found this really surprising. um I thought it was going to decline tremendously ah yeah once isolated, but theyre they're quite solid. So after 1890, he played 11 test matches. So exactly half of his overall number. He top scored with 75, not out. He scored a total of 556 runs with an average of 29.26. So he didn't score a century, just a top score of 75.
00:21:45
Speaker
In first-class cricket, after 1890, he played 368 matches. ah He batted 623 times. He scored 19,944 runs, so still a huge number. His highest score was 301.
00:22:04
Speaker
and his batting average was 31.17 so not bad his overall batting average yeah his overall batting ad average which includes those gigantic scores he hit in the 1870s was 39.45 So after 1890 in isolation, it's still 31, which is, um yeah. And again, for that time, that is very good. yeah and And he scored 34 first class centuries after the age of 42, essentially. um That's remarkable. So yeah just some things to highlight, um other facts, if you will. So he remains the oldest man
00:22:47
Speaker
to captain a test match at 50 years of age. That would have been his final match in 1899. and he remains the third oldest player overall in test cricket. um He is still fifth on the all-time highest first-class runs table. ah So Jack Hobbs is at the top with 61,000 and Grace is just below him 54,000. And he's 10th on the overall all-time number of first-class wickets.
00:23:20
Speaker
So again, that just that just shows why we can't forget about his bowling. Certainly during those early decades, he took a lot of wickets. And in in regards to his first class centuries, he is 11th on the all time list.
00:23:35
Speaker
He's obviously been surpassed, but he's still number 11, which is yeah quite impressive. It is impressive. And actually, I'm interested particularly in in the your breakdown after 1890. And I'm sort of thinking aloud here. But if you look at the test record for batting, I mean, I'm quite surprised. Well, I'm not that surprised, I suppose, that it's still 29. But i I think the thing that strikes me perhaps is that it's a sort of relative decline because he's still a pretty good batsman, but there's some pretty good other batsmen around. If you go back 10 years or so, 15 years, to when he played the great test matches in 1880 and 1882, the other batsmen were
00:24:26
Speaker
there weren't any great batsmen like Stoddard or Ranjit Singhji or Fry. um And so he sort of towered and he was still obviously relatively young or certainly not old. And so he kind of is, I mean, ah it's sort of emblematic to me that his first and greatest test innings, I mean, the first test he played in 1880, where he scores 152, all around him,
00:24:54
Speaker
The other batsmen are scoring 30, including his brother, E.M. are scoring 30s and 40s and 20s. And that was the kind of norm. And this guy has already, I mean, he's just so much better than everybody else. And I don't think anybody, I mean, Murdock was a very good batsman and very, very competitive cricketer. But I mean, nobody would suggest that Billy Murdock was in the same class. I hope, anyway, they wouldn't. It's W.G. Grace.
00:25:18
Speaker
You fast forward to the 1890s and I think that's part of Grace's problem and he looks around and he knows, you know, Shrewsbury is still around, Stoddart's on the rise, Ranjit Sidji comes along, then there's Fry and so there are all these sort of young pretenders, if you like, and then there's also I think you've got modern county cricket as well, so so he's sort of surrounded by quite a lot of other good batsmen who are probably just as sort of worthy of a place as the test team as him, and more so because they can run in the field. So that would be my sort rather long-winded observation about the fact that it doesn't look so bad on paper statistically, but you you sort of need to see the context.
00:25:59
Speaker
and And statistics can be completely misleading. I mean, I think one of the reasons we don't talk more about CB Fry today, for example, so and I'm talking perhaps from an Australian perspective, is because his test record is not very good. And, you know, I had his biographer Ian Wilton on and we discussed this at length about he just seemed to never be able to capitalise on his test performances. yeah um It didn't help that he'd never played in Australia, but He in and around the test matches, he was scoring centuries at first-class level all the time. But because his test ri ah te cricket statistics today do not look very flash, he's just never brought up in conversation. and but you But if you read contemporary contemporaneous reports, he is one of the superstars of the age yeah without question. yeah
00:26:54
Speaker
to me for a long, long time.
00:27:13
Speaker
Richard, let's talk about WG's legacy. So yeah where do you think he stands today in the minds of modern cricket
Modern Relevance of WG Grace
00:27:21
Speaker
fans? And is his life and legacy still relevant in the 21st century? well Well, I hope I sort of provided some clues that I think he's sort of in a way most relevant to the 21st century. If you try to compare him or the way that he approached sport with anybody else when he started out,
00:27:42
Speaker
ah did there's nobody to compare him with. I mean this guy is just so modern in his outlook and so from that point of view you look at his achievement and I mean one could have endless Discussions and they're quite interesting ones about how great he really was because the bowling was obviously slower But the pictures were worse. but I'm talking about early on in his career I'm with you know, the 1860s in his at his prime if you like 1860s 1870s But the the the achievement is incredible but more to the point what makes him worth writing about what makes him worth talking about I think is is
00:28:21
Speaker
The fact that almost anything, you know that it's him, not one of his ghostwriters, he he writes, is so modern and so sort of, with certain modifications, different language perhaps, you could imagine coming out of the mouth of Steve Waugh, I mean I'm 66, so my sort of references are all sort of from that from 1980s onwards. But I'll give you a small example of this, that somebody described Graham Thorpe, Paul Graham Thorpe, as a great problem solver, as a batsman. Now that was W e.G. But I mean, the problems he was trying to solve were problems that only he could actually see as well. You know, it's like he could see
00:29:09
Speaker
that he learned how to bat classically, but he could see that if you really wanted to score these enormous centuries relentlessly, you needed to adapt. And the only person who could do that was him. You know, so I don't think you really, I mean, it's interesting what you say about C.B. Fry.
00:29:27
Speaker
I can't talk about Australians, so I may be wrong about some of the early ones, but I don't think it's until you get to Bradman that you get someone who has that level of relentlessness, you know, who is just going to score runs, as many runs as he possibly can. And I don't think you really get that level of inventiveness, because even Bradman who was not sort of pretty to watch, as I understand it, but I mean, it was basically that, you know, I've got the art of cricket on my bookshelves. I mean, he's not really sort of deviating very far from the MCC coaching manual. I possibly, some of your listeners will say, yeah, he bloody well. or possibly You're so wrong. So I accept I may be ignorant. But when you read what he what what Grace writes about batting and the way that he then put it into action, well, I'm thinking of all sorts of modern cricketers.
00:30:22
Speaker
i'm thinking of bra lara i'm thinking of callous, I'm thinking of Ricky Ponting, you know the modern greats if you like, that that that's his benchmark and that's why yeah he is definitely worth remembering.
00:30:37
Speaker
I wholeheartedly agree with you. I'll just throw in one name from an Australian perspective earlier than Bradman that may ah you could put in the same bracket as Grace and that would probably be George Giffen who right obviously obviously everything is at a lower level but I mean, not only is he, I think he's referred by the Australian press as the WG of the Antipodes, which right again, is it just really talks to WG's greatness, but he's an all rounder. He plays these um ridiculous matches for South Australia, the colony at the time where he, you know, he'll score a double century and then he will take 16 wickets for the match. So he's got that.
00:31:21
Speaker
you know, just dominating a match. I don't think anyone had dominated Australian matches like Giffen ah yeah in the same way that Grace did in England. um Yeah. So I'll just throw that name out there. But again if and if anyone's listening and has another name, please. Yeah. I mean, I i would probably write back a little bit because I don't know anything about, ah you know, i obviously my my sort of such as it is, my expertise is in in WG Grace. And then, but if you just are, there may be other cricketers, but If you're just asking me about Grace in his time and what he you know whether he should be remembered today, well, absolutely, because when you look at this guy, he's he's just he's just modern, no question.
00:32:04
Speaker
And and what um what is there for us to see in regards to WG Grace today? And I assume I know nothing about ah England. like you know Are there statues of him around? Are there yeah anything else if you go to a cricket ground in England today? Are you likely to see something in honour of him? Well, I'll come to the statue.
00:32:26
Speaker
at the end because it's in many ways the most interesting and it has also as you'll see an Australian angle to it very much but the sad thing is that actually an awful lot of you know if you want to go and see Grace's house in where he lived in Bristol when he was a doctor it doesn't exist I mean there's an awful lot of ah the house where he lived in in Sydenham it's been knocked down so a lot of that has gone um and In terms of the what is well known, there's the Grace Gates at Lourdes, which we were erected after the First World War, which are fine gates, but they don't really sort of remind one particularly of of Grace. I like the inscription on that. I can't quite remember it off by heart, but it's it's it's a fine set of iron gates. It doesn't make me think particularly about WG Grace.
00:33:17
Speaker
I think in Bristol, they I mean they have Grace Gates at at the county ground in grist brit Bristol, but if you're asking me, the ground itself no longer looks anything like it did in Grace's day, and to me the spirit of WG Grace, if you want to if you want to imagine him,
00:33:35
Speaker
Clifton College, which is where he's played a lot of cricket for for Gloucestershire, is a fantastic setting for cricket. is' There's these mid-Victorian Gothic buildings in the background. um So that would it's not a monument to W.G. Grace, but it's very that's the best place, I think, to imagine W.G. Grace playing cricket.
00:33:57
Speaker
The story of his grave, which is down in Elmer's End, it's near Crystal Palace in south-east London, and it's a very interesting one, and a very sad one in many ways. um And what happened was that was where Bessie, his daughter, was was was buried, and then also ah Bertie, when he died, his his eldest son, his youngest son Charlie is not buried there um but his wife Agnes is but that's where WG was buried that's where his funeral took place nearby and then he's buried there in 1915 and then there's this extraordinary thing that happens
00:34:39
Speaker
which is the reason I'm saying telling this at length is because it has a very interesting ending to it, which is the grave itself is neglected between the wars and then the Second World War comes along and somebody is walking through the graveyard in 1943, I think it's 4243 and it's been hit by shrapnel it's sort of got weeds growing all over it and this is just sort of disgraceful if you'll forgive the pun and and he writes to his uh a relative in in Bristol and somebody decides that something must be done and it's sort of tidied up but it's basically a wreck and a ruin you get 1948 the centenary of his birth and Pelham Warner
00:35:25
Speaker
who is making who's made a living really out of pretending to know WG Grace much better than he did. He goes down to Bristol so for some anniversary event there to inaugurate, I think, the the Grace Gates down there. Nobody, there's nothing on this ruined grave that is that is placed on the day in South London, apart from one wreath with a card And it's sent by the touring Australian cricket team. And I cannot remember the quote exactly, but it says something like, in memory of WG Grace, the great cricketer from all Australia. Now, I know nothing more about it than that, but it is absolutely perfect. Because of course, no team played cricket more like Grace wanted to play cricket than these Australians.
00:36:22
Speaker
And I think also there was something about Grace, and this is romanticising a bit, and I came across a possibly apocryphal quote by Geoff Thompson about both of them, where he said something like, for a poem, he would have made a good Aussie. And that was Grace. So that's the first little sort of Australian note. And then I would recommend anybody going to Lord's,
00:36:47
Speaker
should now look at the statue in the garden which was put there just behind the pavilion, behind the warner stand where everybody goes for lunch during the interval, the everybody has the picnics and there's this statue of Grace A big, big statue. ah Playing a shot through the leg side, a sort of glance. I'll come back to that in a minute. It's sort of through mid-wicket. And it's huge. And it's really good. And it's by an Australian sculptor, Lewis Lowman. Apologies to him if I've mispronounced his name.
00:37:21
Speaker
And in my book, I finished the book by saying, it's absolutely, technically perfect, this shop that Grace is playing. And a friend of mine, after the book came out, said, are you sure?
00:37:35
Speaker
It looks to me like he's hitting it in the air. I said the next time I was at Lord's I live quite near Lord's and I'm a member there. I went in and I had a look and he's dead right. I mean there's no way that Grace is playing that shot and he's not playing it in the air but then I thought it's okay.
00:37:51
Speaker
there's a get out of jail card here Richard because in fact it is still perfect because Grace played the ball so much in the air and there's this famous story Rosslyn told about him coming into art into the pavilion at Gloucester after a game he was playing in the 1880s and some stupid member said oh you know sort of jolly good innings WGB he did play it a lot in the air and he just looked at them and said Well, they didn't catch it, did they? So yeah that's to me, go and look at the sculpture. And then, of course, go and look at the, if they'll let you in, go and look at the the picture in the long room. But that's not really WG.
00:38:30
Speaker
No, that's all a brilliant summary of WG that you've ah given us there. I mean, my takeaway is that it sounds like you're admitting that WG would have made a great Australian, but, um you know, with with this the story relating... Yeah, I mean, he would have made a great Australian. I mean, actually, since he's an Australian podcast, I was pondering. I mean, did he really like Australia? He was very good friends with some Australians, you know, Murdoch being the the most obvious example. I mean, he liked their company.
00:39:00
Speaker
He hated the Australian press, absolutely hated it, hated them. And he, I think he felt, he never sort of quite could come to terms with Australia. um You know, he had this, he was always in a bad temper, basically in Australia, he was never really happy. But um yeah, he would have been a great Australian.
00:39:23
Speaker
And finally, Richard, if we were to plant WG Grace in a time machine and bring him to 2025, what do you think the old man would think of modern cricket?
WG Grace's Perspective on Modern Cricket
00:39:36
Speaker
And that's everything from white ball, day night cricket, women's cricket. What do you think he would have made of it all?
00:39:44
Speaker
Well, I think the first thing to say, fairly obviously, is if you take the grace of the 1860s, I mean, he was absolutely made for for one day cricket, 2020 cricket. He was a fantastic fielder. He was incredibly fast between the wickets, all of that, and also inventive.
00:40:01
Speaker
I mean, you know, made up shots just to, to sort of score runs. I mean, stuff that wasn't in the, in the coaching manual. So he would have been, I mean, if you, I suppose if you'd bring it back as the grand old man, if you like, but do you imagine what he had been? I think he would, he would have loved one day cricket. He would have loved all of that, um, inventiveness that, you know, the scoops, the sort of, you know, reverse sweeps and all the rest of it, because that's the sort of thing that he did.
00:40:27
Speaker
and you see it time and again with grace I mean I'll just give you one example where at time and again people say well he kept hitting the ball over the slips well of course he was hitting the ball over the slips that's where he was going to score us now that's a modern shot you know it wasn't what other people did um so on that yep I would definitely say he would like that he would like day night cricket I have to say, sadly, he might not have approved of women's cricket, but he might be convertible to it because I think the one thing I haven't quite got over is is his he was very adaptable.
00:41:05
Speaker
I mean, as far as he was concerned, cricket was not set in stone, and there's all sorts of examples of him are quite late in his career when he he finds googlyboating really puzzling, and he writes a very interesting little essay about it, about how to play googlyboating, and he he gets some of it wrong, some of it right, but he's he's always interested in the next big thing, and in in sort of what is the next thing you can do with this game to do this, that, or the other? And I think if somebody said to him, well, look, if you think where women's cricket was 10 years ago, and you look at where it is today, this is a big thing that's happening. And I think that's the point about WG Grace. he He was persuadable. you'd You'd need to do a number on him, but he was persuadable. So I'll give a qualified yes to that as well.
00:41:55
Speaker
and that possibly speaks to why he played so long is because he was always interested in what was next. If he wasn't a modernist so to speak he probably would have given up the game because there were, it probably doesn't look like it from the 21st perspective, but there were some huge changes in cricket during his career and as you say He was a adaptable cricketer. um Well, Richard, that's ah that brings us to the end of the podcast. I have to thank you immensely for joining me. um One of the things I've said to many people since starting this podcast is that um there's going to be lots of different cricketers that I cover from
00:42:36
Speaker
England, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand. But I can't do this podcast without talking about WG Grace. So thank you so much for your knowledge. um I loved your book. And for anyone out there who's interested, the book is Amazing Grace, The Man Who Was WG. I and would encourage you to seek it out because I thought I knew a lot about WG, but I came away knowing even more. So thanks again, Richard, for being my guest today. Thank you.
00:43:06
Speaker
That's all from me. Please subscribe to the podcast or follow the channel on Twitter or YouTube. My name is Tom Ford and until next time, it's bye for now.
00:43:27
Speaker
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