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W. G. Grace – Part 2 – with Richard Tomlinson
39 Plays46 minutes ago
Part 2 of the episode dedicated to the latter stages of the life and career of the most famous cricketer of all time – W. G. Grace. In this episode, biographer Richard Tomlinson discusses Grace’s relationship with his cricket-playing daughter Bessie, his disastrous final Test match in 1899, and his move from the Gloucestershire County Cricket Club to the newly formed London County Cricket Club.
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 Option
00:00:07
Speaker
Welcome to part two of my chat with biographer Richard Tomlinson on the life and career of W.G. Grace within the period known as the Golden Age of Cricket. My name is Tom Ford. If you'd like to make a small donation to the podcast, please visit BuyMeACoffee.com slash Golden Age of Cricket.
Bessie Grace: Talent and Tragedy
00:00:28
Speaker
We pick up our chat as we discuss Grace's relationship with his daughter Bessie, and his attitude to women's cricket. you' play from Still talking about his children, unlike Bertie, yeah um his daughter Bessie actually is a very fine cricketer. And when she's, you know, but she's a leading cricketer of her age group when she's sort of 12, 13. But then when she comes of age, so to speak, WG just says no more cricket for you, Bessie, I'm afraid. um Was WG just being of his age or was he a particularly domineering father, do you think?
00:01:08
Speaker
Well, I think he was being of his age. um I was amused to see, I think I'm right, that she did actually play one more game of cricket after, that that was recorded anyway, after ah he's he said that. um She was also, it's it's hard to tell how good she was as a cricketer. I possibly, he thought she was a great cricketer and he she played he loves it on the boat to Australia in 80 because she goes with him when she's only 12 years old and the youngest one, Charlie's on on the boat as well. And she beats the boys at everything, including a game of cricket on on deck. And she says she's so bright she's obviously a sporty girl. I have to say that I did come across her batting scores one season for ah the the girls' school in in Clifton, where she went. And she didn't score many runs, but like ah one just has to believe that she was yeah pretty good at cricket ah for a girl, which is how he would he would have seen things.
00:02:04
Speaker
The most awful thing in WGN Agnes' life that had ever happened to them, and i think I think it surpassed anything else, was Bessie dying of typhoid in early 1899. And this is just after he had moved to Sydenham in southeast London to play ah start this new cricket club, the London County Cricket Club for the Crystal Palace Company.
00:02:34
Speaker
and I think it colours absolutely everything that happened to him that year which included this celebrated bust up with Gloucestershire, the humiliation of his last test match um against Australia, his last test match ever, where he's jeered by the crowd and he resigns the captaincy and says calls time on his test career straight after, pretty much straight after that. And when you look at it and you put it in that sort of context, I think that WG Grace
00:03:09
Speaker
ah He was so overwhelmed by grief and also concerned for Agnes, ah who seems to have just sunk into the the deepest, deepest depression, that he he sort of lost the plot. He couldn he couldn't make decisions for rationally about anything else. And I think it's also incidentally why his his second book of memoirs, which is published in 1899,
00:03:34
Speaker
apart from the bits about batting bowling and and fielding and captaincy I think which he'd he'd already written really so bad because and so unreliable because he's this ghost writer is coming to see him ah day after day in the in the weeks after Bessie dies trying to get Grace to talk about his cricket career and you just know it's it's the last thing on his mind so it's the most awful thing ah to happen to any parent really um and I don't think he ever recovers from it either. I think a lot of what happens in his later life is is is coloured by this this death that just comes out of the blue and is even worse because he's a doctor and and they think she's recovering and then she dies so it's it's just the most terrible terrible
00:04:26
Speaker
Yeah. story And it is, again, i'm I'm going to give you credit here. It's one of the things which, you know, I asked you before, can you write anything new about grace? Well, of course you can, because your book, for example, you know, it does touch on the You know, it it doesn't just pass over her death, you know, it puts it in context and certainly anyone listening who's read any biographies from say the first half of the 20th century probably would have mentioned the death, but then moved on straight away. So modern biography is so much more, it's entertaining, but they have that insight and they're not afraid to discuss the psychology of
00:05:08
Speaker
what this what this would mean for someone like WG. It's really fascinating. Richard, we're well into the podcast and I feel like we haven't even touched on ah one aspect of WG's career, which was a huge aspect. I mean, we always
Cricketing Mastery and Records
00:05:24
Speaker
talk about his batting, but we haven't spoken at all about the fact that he was truly a great all-rounder. You know, his bowling made such a huge part of his career, but it certainly played a huge part in the first few decades of his career. So again, just putting it in the context
00:05:42
Speaker
of the golden age. um Sure. His bowling sort of dried up in the 1890s and what do we put that down to? Was it again because he was of a certain age or was it a tactical move on his part to sort of save himself for his batting?
00:06:00
Speaker
No, I well i think with it it's that that he was playing against better batsmen who figured out how to deal with the stuff. There's quite a lot of that. He was also not very fit, but he was a pretty slow bowler. um I mean, I think when you look at Grace's bowling and one does have to talk a little bit about the but the The context is pre-Golden Age because in his youth he was a pretty good medium fast bowler with a round arm action. I mean that was how they all bowled back then. That's really the 1860s, early 1870s.
00:06:37
Speaker
but he's getting bigger and fat we's getting fatter and fatter and slower and slower and I think there's no definitive moment where you can say that he's a slow bowler but he's and he's given up on the quicker stuff but he's definitely a slow bowler. By the time you get to the late 1870s and he takes a phenomenal number of wickets He takes, in that period, it's almost like in five seasons, he takes something like nearly 900, maybe more than 900 wickets. And so you have to then kind of say, well, what on earth is this guy doing? The first one who really gets it, I think, about about Grace and his slowboing, his slows as he called them, was a very, very good local report, cricket reporter in Bristol called H.E. Rosslyn.
00:07:27
Speaker
And a lot of the best writing about him, I i found, was was was by Rosslyn. And this is Rosslyn looking at Grace when he was a slow bowler in the 1880s. And he says, his run, I'm quoting, his run, more correctly, his scuffle up to the wicket was short with elbows bent. Then his right arm would be thrust out with hand, not above not much above the head, and the ball would roll out of his hand.
00:07:56
Speaker
And what Rosalind misses from that is the fact that he often bowled around the wicket, and he often wore his MCC cap. So it's it's a sort of exercise in distraction, first of all. He's not really turning it very much. um And then there's another observer from this period. And this, this this to me, is almost more interesting, or it's just as interesting, which is Spoffoth.
00:08:24
Speaker
WG's great opponent um and he he commented about Grace's bullying that he said he so juggles with you that you were beaten in spite of yourself and the reason he's getting inside your head which is exactly what Grace was trying to do is of course firstly because he's WG Grace And you've got to imagine there's a classic WG Grace delivery. He's got his brother, he's playing for Gloucestershire, and you see it again and again. And you've got his brother, it's very, very modern this, EM, feeling a sort of a suicidal, sort of silly point. You've got his great friend, Frizzy Bush, the wicket keeper, huge rugby player um behind the steps, and they're both growling at the bats, and there's an awful lot of sledging going on.
00:09:11
Speaker
And then the other key position, which I actually saw recently, which which shows you how modern Grace was. He has his great mate Frank Telzer in this weird position.
00:09:25
Speaker
Townsend's a Bristol schoolteacher. He has him not at a very, very almost sort of straight behind the umpire, mid on to about halfway through to the boundary. Now actually by accident came across a clip this season of Marnas Labashein bowling in a Sheffield Shill game.
00:09:48
Speaker
And he's placing the field and he does more or less what WG did. It's obviously an exercise in distraction. There's some field and he hasn't got a clue where... And Labishein is very, very precise about where he wants him. But the whole point of this is that you have the batsman thinks, WG Grace, oh, you know, I'm going to hit him over the top. And of course Townsend, time and again, he doesn't quite get it right that the batsman catches him.
00:10:14
Speaker
He's kidding the batsman that it's turning, it's not, and du EM is giving him all sorts of sledge um and picking up catches there. And then quite often the batsman has a great big sort of yahoo and and he's stumped. So he's a very, very effective bowler, brilliant bowler, but for a very short time in his career, I mean, by the time you get to the 80s,
00:10:37
Speaker
he's really become, I mean people have got used to this stuff, I mean the but the obvious thing to do is to push him for ones and twos and I think that's what's sort of happening. So if you look at the volume of wickets, he does take, I can't remember how many thousand wickets he takes, he takes an awful lot of wickets but there's a sort of intensity if you like around the late 1870s when he's bowing this stuff and people just can't really sort of figure it out.
00:11:03
Speaker
Yeah, and we will touch on his statistics later in the podcast. From memory, I think he takes 2800 first class wickets or so, which is yeah you know it's a huge number. It's an enormous number. And it's you know it's it's ah it's a number of a cricketer who bowling is really the second objective, really. um you know But as you say, for a period there, he was almost equal batsman, equal bowler. And some, you know, we might touch on that later again. He has some match figures, which are just extraordinary. um and
00:11:40
Speaker
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00:12:03
Speaker
four more years they run again So that's his bowling, so if we return to his batting in 1895, so 30 years after he makes his first class debut, he's approaching 48 years of age, he experiences one of the finest summers of all time really, a summer just completely out of the box. um He becomes the first
00:12:35
Speaker
batsman to score a thousand first-class runs in the month of may and then perhaps more iconically he brings up his 100th first class century and this is the first time anyone has done it and i think at that point in time the next person in line had only scored like 50 first class centuries. So he's just so far ahead of the competition. yeah um Was there anything particular about 1895 that you can think of that helps explain this iconic Indian summer?
00:13:10
Speaker
I think firstly, um the the weather. The weather was dry and quite hot, I think, sunny anyway, for the first half of the ah summer. So he was playing on on on good, you know, the wickets have got a lot better and he was playing on good wickets. If one's going to adjust slightly the old man image one has of him, he's actually more dynamic then I mean, he's 46, 47. He's more dynamic than you might think. And there unfortunately, I couldn't reproduce any others. And there's only one that I that i i used in the book, therefore. There were some cartoons that are very, very good cartoonists called Harry Furness, Drew of W.G.
00:13:59
Speaker
batting and actually also bowling and fielding in one of the the the games that summer where he scores 100 is the gentleman versus players at Lord's in I think July 1895 and you can see from Furness's pictures that that Grace was still capable of sprinting um or at least running fast and you know the the pictures of him batting are fantastic um So I think he was he was he was not fit, but he wasn't completely sort of decrepit either. So I think that would be another reason. And I think the third thing is, and this is something that he never lost, is that Grace used to go on these hot streaks.
00:14:45
Speaker
where once things happened, batting wise with grace, he was just relentless in sort of, okay, I mean, the the most intense one before 1895, I think, would be in 1876, when he does this incredible thing where he scores 344th.
00:15:04
Speaker
and in a big century at Bristol and then 318 in Cheltenham and he does it all in the space of about eight days and actually it's prefaced by a century scores in an impossible on an impossible pitch but against a very strong bowling attack of northern professionals up in Yorkshire so he does this you know that once he sort of gets in he wants to sort of really milk milk it for all it's worth and he's just on a roll and oddly enough i think that i think the innings that sums it up best is the innings where he scored his hundredth hundred and it was actually quite cold whether it was dry it sort of slightly changes what i would say it's not all warm sunshine but he gets to his hundred rather depressingly because do you talk about sammy woods at all in the the golden age
00:15:58
Speaker
yes yeah yeah well sammy woods was he was sort of kind of like a proto eat ian both of them and he's bowling for somerset it's australian he plays for somerset for quite a long time Sammy Woods knows WG Grace quite well and i just and when he when Grace gets to, I think it's 99, 98, 99, Woods bowls in what I say is the most depressing ball in WG Grace's career, which is a sort of longhop outside long leg stump because he cannot bear to be the bowler who gets WG Grace out on the cusp of this great event.
00:16:29
Speaker
but the more interesting thing is what happens next which is that grace hasn't had enough. He wants he wants to get a double century and then he wants to get a triple century so he just carries on and in in the end he's only out. He's out I think for 288 So he's really, he knows he's this isn't going to come around very often anymore and he just milks it for as long as he can until I think it's true the wickets turn wet. ah You know the weather turns and the batting conditions are not quite as good and he tails off a bit in the second half of the season.
00:17:03
Speaker
Yeah. And just listening to you describe his hunger for batting just reminds me, uh, what makes me think Richard, I mean, he was a bit of a pioneer in terms of the large scores. Wasn't he? I mean, we think if we, if we fast forward a few decades, you know, you've got Bill Ponsford and Don Bradman who are like run getting machines. I mean, albeit on very comfortable doped wickets, you know, but they're regularly scoring double centuries and triple and,
00:17:32
Speaker
in the case of Ponsford, quadruple centuries, well, and Rybman. But here here we've got Grace doing it 30, 40 years earlier and just having this insatiable hunger and desire, not just to score a century, but to score a double or a triple and just refusing to get out.
00:17:51
Speaker
I think just briefly we have to talk about the early period because I mean you can be a bit contrarian and say well he'd done most of the heavy lifting for the hundred centuries actually in the first 10-11 years of his career because although you can argue with it in terms of, well, were they all first-class games, Irving Rosenwater, the statistician, he calculated that in 1875,
00:18:28
Speaker
when W.G. Gross scored his 50th century, you had to add up all the centuries scored by the next 13 most prolific batsmen to get a grand total of 50 to match him and not only that he but he was scoring fake big big centuries and double centuries in some of those i mean that did there are two incredible innings he plays in 1866 at the oval one is a double century and the other is a um it he gets out for about 175. I mean these are huge scores and he's only 18 so it's an amazing performance and he then has really he has another really good season in 1876 but from then on
00:19:16
Speaker
It's sort of incremental he's just creeping and he has good years and bad years he has you know one or two years like i have a lot of statistics in front of me but he's maybe scoring six seven centuries but there are other seasons ways any story one or two um so it's it's a long process to get from.
00:19:32
Speaker
50 to 100, which isn't a political, it's an amazing achievement. Yeah. and what And what makes that early period even more fascinating is just this, from what we understand, the state of the pictures and the wickets in those days were yeah quite horrific. I mean, by the time we get into the Golden Age, they' they're beginning to improve, but they still play on uncovered wickets. Yeah, by the 30s, there's just, you know, the pictures are like billiard tables. But in the 1860s and 70s, when Grace was, as you say, hitting these centuries, one after the other, the pictures were just in all sorts of conditions. Some of them, some of them were quite dangerous. I mean, ah they resulted in a few deaths, I believe this is obviously well before helmets. But I don't know how much because it's obviously a long time before the Golden Age. But I mean, the most notorious game
00:20:26
Speaker
It was the george it's called George Summer's match in, I think it's 1871. I may have got them the year wrong. I'm pretty sure it's 1871, correct me if I'm wrong. um And it's played at Lord's and it's MCC against Nottinghamshire, who were probably, the I mean, they were the the strongest county um back then.
00:20:50
Speaker
And it's terrifying. it google Summers is hit, it's worse than terrifying. He's hit on by a young MCC professional fast bowler and ah on the head, gets concussion, because this wicket is just so dangerous, um and dies ah two or three days later. But in the same match, Grace scores a century against one of the top But so he he can do it on bad wickets. I think the one thing one might qualify slightly is I have a sneaking feeling that the Oval was a pretty good batting pitch. It was even back then, as now, it was it was a very professionally run cricket ground. And there were two brothers who who basically looked after managing it.
00:21:37
Speaker
And there were some fairly big scores. he He scored a lot of runs and there were some fairly big scores at the Oval. So um he was pretty fond of the Oval. I mean, that that that was one of his great hunting grounds. But yeah, if he scored 100, he wanted to score 2 or 3, you know.
00:21:54
Speaker
Indeed. Richard, let's talk about Dr. WG Grace. yes um We've already touched on the fact that he was a practicing GP when he wanted to be. yeah What can you tell us about his profession away from cricket? um And how important was it to him?
00:22:12
Speaker
the The first thing I'd say is that there's actually a surprising amount you can find out about his his career as a doctor because the poor law union that he worked for, the Barton Regis Union, their records are in the archives in in Bristol. So I had quite a lot of fun just sort of looking, I mean it's not all about WG Grace, not not principally, but you can find out quite a lot of detail about the working life of W.G. Grace as a doctor. He came from a family of doctors. this this This was the sort of classic way that someone from his background could become middle class, if you like. His father was the son of a servant, I think, or certainly the grandson.
00:22:55
Speaker
ah They came from the seven classes on both sides of his parents' family, certainly his father, and they all became doctors. His father was a doctor, his brothers were doctors. And I don't think it's unfair to say that, I mean, he was a doctor because he had to be, because that was that was what he was going to be. It wasn't that he had any great vocation.
00:23:17
Speaker
to be a doctor. But what I would also say is that doesn't also mean, which is what people said, that he was ah necessarily a bad doctor. It was also said, I mean, and repeated sort of decade after decade after his death, that, oh, well, look, it took him 11, 12 years to qualify as a doctor. So that just shows he was really thick. That was the sort of a subject. Well, no, it was because you played cricket that the whole time. Yes.
00:23:45
Speaker
There's also this odd thing that is needs to be correct, which is that actually his his medical training at Bristol was pretty good. his his Some of his tutors at these prestigious London medical schools he went to were not necessarily that great. I mean, his surgery tutor, I think it was St Bartholomew's, who later became the master of Downing College, Cambridge, was he didn't he was very sceptical about the connection between germs and disease.
00:24:14
Speaker
So you can imagine what his operating theatre was like. So he he qualifies as a doctor in 1879, basically because it's impossible for him to go on being a full-time cricketer without some kind of other income. And that is, of course, when this first fund is raised for him to buy him a practice. So that's the first thing I'd say. The second thing is he he's not he's always referred to as a poor law doctor.
00:24:43
Speaker
That was his practice area, but most of his patients ah in in inner city Bristol were not on the parish, as they said. I mean, that that was in extremis. The poor law union would, if as it were, pay his fees, but most of his income from doctoring actually came from seeing private patients. As to whether he was a good doctor, well, I think that what comes out during this period is that he did have, it's the first time I felt that you could get a sense of someone who, away from the cricket field, and I think this possibly had a lot to do with being married and and bringing up children as well. He was very on the level, he was he was very grounded and sort of empathetic, and there's a lovely memory, one of his sons, we didn't talk about Edgar, ah his his second son,
00:25:33
Speaker
who's sort of rebelled against WG in the sense that his game was tennis and WG hated the sea and the Edgar went off to be ah an admiral eventually in the Navy. But Edgar had a great story he told about Christmas lunch at the Graces in in a Bristol where they just use all the neighbours around and for Christmas lunch, anybody who really couldn't afford to have a proper Christmas lunch. So he had that kind of quality already by then of being, so I think, sort of compassionate and and ah and caring, which is not something you particularly associate with Grace on on the cricket field.
00:26:09
Speaker
And he did it. He carried on doctoring, but he much preferred playing cricket. Obviously, that was his real vocation. He was charging all over the country. So every summer, and and you can pick this up in the local newspapers every spring,
00:26:24
Speaker
he had to hire a locum to look after the practice while he was away playing for Gloucestershire and who knows who else um and they tolerated this the the the poor law union because they were sort of you know i mean it's quite something to have wg grace on you know as one of your daughters uh there were one or two uh who didn't like it at all and then in the end in 1898 he packs it in and why does he pack it in because he's he's he's got this offer from the Crystal Palace company to run this cricket club in in basically found this cricket club first of all and then run it in in South London and they're paying him
00:27:07
Speaker
a reasonable amount of money more than he could earn as a doctor and i think that the reason he he took it was because he wanted it gave him more freedom to be to do the things that he liked to do so it's a sort of mixed picture really It is one of the things I love, one of the many things I love about the Golden Age. Well, really any cricket before say, you know, the advent of full-time professionalism is how you've got the the greatest cricketer of his age who's also a doctor. I mean, that just doesn't happen in the modern world. And it's just brilliant hearing you talk about how he managed both of them.
00:27:43
Speaker
And it's a sort of it's an extraordinary parallel life because you again from local newspapers. like i I came across one extraordinary story. It's a terrible story on one level because he he was required to test this just shows how he's he's both a very ordinary doctor and also he's arguably the most famous celebrity in the world and he there's this dreadful domestic violence case where it's ah it's a wife battering case and he he is required to testify in the local court about the injuries on this poor woman um and he dutifully goes and
00:28:28
Speaker
does his thing and he's leaving the courthouse and the clerk runs after him and says the judge, he's quite a senior judge would take on that regional circuit, the judge would like to see you in his chambers. Grace thinks okay and he he go he can't say no so he goes back and he goes to the judge's chambers thinking what on earth have I done wrong I'm sure.
00:28:57
Speaker
And the judge gets out a big book, his autograph book, and he wants WG Grace's autograph, which WG Grace signs. So the judge can go home and tell his wife, guess what I did today? I got WG Grace's autograph. So it is this incredible sort of double life that he's living.
00:29:18
Speaker
I was thinking earlier, I'm sure there were patients of his who probably feigned injury or illness just to go and attend.
Beyond Cricket: Refereeing and Legacy
00:29:28
Speaker
You bet. Seeing doctor famous, Dr. WG Grace, I'm sure. There's another thing you've reminded me of, which is one of the things he did in the winter was he was he was a football referee and soccer referee in local games.
00:29:41
Speaker
and these games used to get, there was one game and of course he he gets into terrible rouse with everybody including you know one of the the visiting clubs and they think he's biased and there's a huge great buster but the thing that's more interesting is these games they're just they're just soccer games already are in and around Bristol and you get these huge crowds turning up you know several thousand people turn up because they want to see WG Grace refereeing just seeing this guy um so he just attracts crowds wherever he goes
00:30:24
Speaker
you won't my pain. Well returning to the cricket and if we skip along to 1899, we've mentioned this already, what turns out to be his final test match against the visiting Australian side of 1899 under Joe Darling. ah So he plays in the first test match of that series at Nottingham. Yeah.
00:30:55
Speaker
It's iconic for a number of reasons now when we look back through the lens of history. I mean, it's Wilford Rhodes first test match. and I just love that team photo where you've got Grace, ah the aging Grace sitting in the middle and below him is the young Wilford Rhodes and between them I mean, if you look at their first class career, the arc literally spans eight decades. It's extraordinary. to me um And I think Victor Trump makes his test debut for the touring Australians as well. In his first innings, Grace actually did okay. he um
00:31:32
Speaker
As captain he he opened the batting with Fry and he scored 28 before being caught behind off Monty Noble. ah Fry went on to score a half century. In the second innings he was out for one. He was bowled by Bill Howe, who I just happened to know, doing some research the other day, Bill Howe was in a particular purple patch himself. he um ah In a match just before this one um against Surrey, he took all 10 wickets. So he was right he was in fine form, but um yeah, back to Grace, out for one, clean, bold in the second innings. What do we make of his final test match, Richard? Did he play too long, do you think?
00:32:15
Speaker
but Well, definitely. And he knew that. I mean, that's why he threw in the towel afterwards. I think as I was talking earlier about the death of Bessie, I think everything has to be seen in that context. um That he sort of... got completely dazed by grief, if you like, and he had already got admired in a running dispute, which ended badly for him with Gloucestershire, about this weird idea he had that he was going to carry on playing for Gloucestershire while he was playing for this other club in London, South East London, that he'd just started playing for. um So that was going on.
00:32:58
Speaker
he clearly should not have been playing in the test match. there was There was already a lot of commentary in the press about the fact that he wasn't worth his place in the side. But the problem was that nobody could figure out a way of making WG Grace make the decision he needed to make as one of the senior selectors and in indeed the captain of the team that he was going to withdraw. And so he turns up for this test match and he almost everything about it is humiliating for him he opens the batting with cb fry who as near as dammit is basically what grace had been uh back in the 1860s and fry is this magnificent athlete you know
00:33:44
Speaker
champion athlete in his own right, plays football, plays all sorts of sports, brilliant batsmen, fast between the wickets. Grace very obviously cannot keep up with Frye and so they're missing all sorts of runs. I mean Frye talks about this later that they can't, they're a sort of twos that they don't take, they turn into ones, ones that they don't take because Grace just can't manage it. So that's where the humiliation begins. And he is then jeered by the crowd, ah the Nottinghamshire crowd, when he whenever he tries to field the ball or not field the ball, stooping down, um mock cheering. So it's it's it's terrible from that point of view.
00:34:32
Speaker
And he does indeed finally after this test match realize that he just cannot go through this again and he rules him out himself out I mean he's he basically at the next selectors meeting London he just says that said finish, I'm not going to play test cricket again, which of course really is a decision he should have made.
00:34:52
Speaker
quite some time before because we can look at the statistics but he played one absolutely great test innings which was his first ever test when he scores 152 and is of course famously pipped um by Billy Myrtle who scores 153.
00:35:10
Speaker
but he never again he scores one other century which seems to have been a rather sort of streaky century and he never again really sort of hits the heights in test cricket so he's years, years beyond where he has any right to be in the test team.
00:35:26
Speaker
So let's talk about this move away from the Gloucestershire County Cricket Club, which happens around this time, in fact in the same year as his final test match. So he, you know, he's the famous son of that cricket club and he makes the switch to ah the newly formed London County Cricket Club, which is owned by the Crystal Palace Company,
00:35:50
Speaker
why essentially in a nutshell did he leave Gloucestershire and what was it about this Crystal Palace company that seemed so attractive to him?
00:36:01
Speaker
Well, he one of the things is it's a ah really weird story on one level because he doesn't formally leave Gloucestershire. that's That's one of the the sort of nightmares that that he leaves behind. But he does accept this contract to start this cricket club called London County Cricket Club.
00:36:23
Speaker
playing down in Crystal Palace Park, just beneath where the Crystal Palace had been at the top of the hill, had been transplanted after the Great Exhibition. And they offer him a fairly attractive contract and in terms of basically it's an all year round contract, so he doesn't have to do his doctoring anymore. um And I think possibly he's looking for a sort of fresh start, but i do but in his own mind he he seems to think that he can carry on playing for Gloucestershire as well, which is completely contradictory because the idea about London County, as the name implies, is it's a slither between Surrey and Kent that has, under local government, we're not going to get into this in detail, but it's it's it's local government real remapping basically means there's this area
00:37:15
Speaker
that they can call London County because it is in fact a county and then it's going to be a first-class county because it's got WG Grace. So that's the idea, he's going to earn some money and the reason the Crystal Palace company wants him is because they're looking for an attraction, they're looking for somebody who can draw people down to down to Crystal Palace, down to Sydenham.
00:37:37
Speaker
and then go and look at all the other things in in this enormous a glass palace which they've never really been able in modern language to monetize properly i mean it's a it's a big big loss making enterprise so for them it's sort of like the the last throw of the dice so it has everything going against it in other words as as an enterprise.
00:37:57
Speaker
Yeah and last throw of the dice indeed, I mean the London County Career Club folds in 1904, so it's only around for five or six summers. But that's not the end of WG's first class career, he keeps playing he matches here and there such as the famous gentleman versus players matches and then even when he retires from first-class cricket in 1908 he then just keeps playing minor cricket matches here and there way up until 1914 you know when he's I mean he's 66 when he plays his final
00:38:37
Speaker
ah official match. um
Grace's Enduring Passion for Cricket
00:38:40
Speaker
What was it? I know this might be an impossible question to answer or perhaps you've already answered it, but what was it about cricket that he loved so much and that he just couldn't give up?
00:38:51
Speaker
Well, I think i I was rereading what I'd written about this this period because as I said, before I got to it, I thought, how on earth am I going to make this interesting? He's he's just playing this minor club cricket, um lots of it. um And it sort of seems slightly weird on one level. um And in fact, I found it, in the end, terribly moving. um And so I'll try and explain as briefly as I can why i did and i i accept this this was the most subjective part of my book really and first of all london county actually initially it's not it's not a complete flop i mean it's quite jazzy cricket because it because grace is good at getting you know he's got billy murdoch is now living down the road from him and uh he's a stalwart of this club and he manages to get
00:39:44
Speaker
sort of teams to come and play against them with the likes of C.B. Fry, Rancho Sinji, I think, plays there. So it's sort of quite jazzy. It sort of reminds me slightly, do you remember, well, I'm old enough to remember the International Cavaliers. It was sort of... No, I don't. I'm afraid. Well, it was back in the 60s and it was kind of like you'd find Dennis Compton turning out for them, you know, and sort of, you know,
00:40:10
Speaker
basically sort of slightly super-annuated, but great cricketers would mix with the likes of sobers. And anyway, it was a bit like that. it The cricket club doesn't actually fold completely. And this is where I started getting really interesting because it carries on. And this is a lot of the work, the initial work on sort of digging all of this stuff up. It was done by Joe Weber in that great book, The Chronicle of W.G.
00:40:35
Speaker
And it turns he it sort of turns into just another cricket club in Surrey, Kent, that part of that part of England. And you can find these these games. I've even played, I come from that part of England where I used to play a lot of cricket down there. um Against clubs like Isha Sutton, she you know and these you know the old style cricket books and there you have Joe so-and-so bold 24 by WG Grace or and it's amazing you can tell you these ordinary club cricketers have a story to tell
00:41:10
Speaker
yes So I'm then and i then it then slides down a bit further because he leaves Crystal Palace basically because they stopped paying him and he has been a sort of meter and greeter for the football club. I mean they decide that football is the thing so that's when Crystal Palace Football Club is founded.
00:41:28
Speaker
he's for a while he does a bit of bit for them but then he moves to another part of um further further east another suburb called Mottingham which is near Eltham it's kind of semi-rural really back then and he gets involved in the local cricket club and he eventually and this is a lower level of cricket and he eventually ends up playing as captain of the second 11 of Elton Cricket Club. I mean, can you imagine, you know, you're you' yeah you're you're just any old Joe Bloggs and you turn up and there's WG Grace playing against you. It's just the most amazing thing. So what did I think about all of this? And I, again, I'm possibly over theorized, but I think
00:42:13
Speaker
that what comes out of this, for me, was the fact that Grace really did just, he was just he just loved cricket. He was a true, true Corinthian in that sense. And I think it was also the only place where he had this you know he was looking after his wife who was was in mourning for two of her children he also had two other of his old ladies he was looking after at home um who one was I think a maiden arm and the other was a cousin so that he's got this household which is
00:42:49
Speaker
sort of if you like it's a very very sort of it's sad setting at home and he just loves cricket and he goes on playing cricket until the outbreak of the First World War. um And for me, there was one story which just summed it up ah that that that that this was another dimension of grace that that I hadn't really sort of considered enough, or it only came to the fore, if you like, at the very end of his life.
00:43:20
Speaker
And there's this incredibly pompous event that the MCC organises in 1912, which is the centenary of moving to the present ground at Lourdes. And wub we haven't really talked about this, but WG Grace had a far more semi-detached relationship with the MCC than the MCC's official history. It might make you believe. um But anyway, they've got to have old WG Grace along for this sort of really silly game that's been organized against, I think, it's south africa the South African tourists to commemorate this extraordinary event. And then there's this huge dinner afterwards. And Grace turns up at this dinner. He attends one one day's play, and then he turns up at the dinner, and he's got this huge sticking plaster.
00:44:05
Speaker
over his eye. And somebody said, what's happened, WG? And it turns out he's he's injured it, fielding in a game for Elton's seconds against something like Goldsmith College. And then they say, well, are you going to come and come along tomorrow to the game? Because there's another day. And he says, I'm terribly sorry, but I've got another game of cricket I'm going off to. And that's him. He just wants to go on playing cricket.
00:44:31
Speaker
um So for me, I accept that it was pretty subjective, but I felt that he becomes so endearing at the end of his life playing and making all sorts of sort of feeble excuses for why he's got to go on playing cricket, you know, to bring on the Colts and yeah all the rest of it.
00:44:48
Speaker
It's really interesting hearing you talk about just his desire to play cricket. There's so many other examples of other cricketers from this same period. I had Gideon Hague on the podcast talking about Warwick Armstrong and he was the same. I mean, just any match, any match, regardless of rank or importance, he would be up for it, even if it was up against children. I mean, he would, he would just be and did describe do the same thing as go go on, play you know, after he'd ceased playing first class cricket. did he
00:45:20
Speaker
I don't think so. not Not certainly to the extent of Grace. i mean Armstrong had ah quite a long career. He led Australia to England in 1921 to great success and yeah not too dissimilar to Grace. you know At that point he was huge. He was you know known as the big ship and he had he'd become this iconic large figure like Grace. I don't think he kept playing sort of infinitely like Grace, but just loved playing any match. If a match was put to him, he would accept. It's just, yeah, yeah these men just can't get enough of the game, which is, yeah it's endearing, I think.