"W.G.”

Press, Volume LXXXIV, Issue 25549, 17 July 1948, Page 6

"W.G.”

CRICKET’S GREATEST PERSONALITY

CENTENARY OF BIRTH CELEBRATED

To-morrow is the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of the man who did more to make cricket popular than anyone else; the man whose deeds, in playing conditions which, by modern standards, were impossible, still bear comparison with those of a more synthetic and less colourful age. At Lord’s, the scene of so many of his triumphs, a match to mark the centenary of the birth of Dr. W. G. Grace has just finished. •‘W.G.’s’’ long career (1863 to 1908) began at the very time modern bowling began, with legal sanction being given the bowler to deliver the ball from above -the shoulder. It could be said to have ended at the close of another definite period, a glorious era which gradually gave way to overprepared wickets, astronomical scores and. too often, a cautious mediocrity. Dr. Grace was the greatest personality to dominate British sport. He played for George Parr’s famous AllEngland Eleven at the age of 15. and within a few years had revolutionised the art of batting. Until Grace's time, cricket historians tell us, batsmen were either forward or back players. Grace was the first, and the greatest, of modern batsmen. “Almost a Fable’’

“Already Grace is almost a fable, like Hercules,” wrote R. C. RobertsonGlasgow, in a recent tribute. “He has suffered the familiar fate of heroes. His colossal periormances were torn from their time and subjected to the operations of statisticians, to the mathematics of cheeseparing scalesmen who weigh Grace against Hobbs or Bradman or Hammond and find the Old Man some thousands of something or other short. But Grace is not measurable; he is equal only to himself. . . . W. G. Grace made cricket, as certainly as Dickens made Mr Pickwick; and that Grace missed a catch or half-volley, matters no more than if Browning missed a rhyme or Irving a cue. A few more'hundreds of years and the Germans will claim him as their own. They had a good try with Shakespeare.” In the same vein, Neville Cardus has written: “We were discussing his records; the essential ones are unapproached, let alone broken. Where is the next cricketer capable of weighing 18 or 20 stones and growing an immense black beard at the same time? Where is the next cricketer capable of ‘W.G.’s’ never-ending energy, gusto and enjoyment of the game? Where is the next cricketer capable of carrying out his bat for 300, then fielding the whole length of the otfier side’s two innings, and then, on the last evening, immediately alter the match is over, capable also of running uphill to the station for the last train, hugging a cricket bag, whiskers blowing in the wind, while a mob of happy, cheering urchins- follows after?” First Test Century Grace’s performances, considered in any light, were wonderful, when it is remembered that in his early days it was possible, even at Lord’s, to gather a handful of gravel from the pitch, and that bowler’s foot-holes from previous matches were seldom filled in. Grace scored a double century at the age of 18, his first threefigure score, and on the second day of the match left the field to win the quarter-mile hurdle race of the National Olympian Sporting Association. In the 1860’s and 1870’s the cricket world was his Lilliput. He made big scores regularly, many of them against the Players, obtained large numbers of wickets, and showed wonderful speed in the field. In 1876, he scored 1278 runs in 10 innings in August, including 838 in three consecutive innings, once not out. He regularly scored 1000 runs and took 100 wickets in a season, but from 1880 onwards he had more serious opposition from other batsmen. In 1880. playing in his first test for England, he had the distinction of scoring 142, the first English test century. In 1895 Grace enjoyed a sort of cricketing Indian summer. He scored 1000 runs in May—this at the age of 47—although in the first fortnight his total was only 159. Against Somerset, he scored his hundredth hundred and finished the season with an aggregate of 2346 runs. . , Last Match Against Players In 1898 the Gentlemen and Players match was chosen as his fiftieth birthday match, and it was the occasion for a tremendous display of enthusiasm. In the following season he played his last test match. The end was in sight, but he still made sojne big scores, and on his fifty-sixth birthday he scored 166 for London County against the M-C.C. Two years later he played for Gentlemen against Players for the last time — he had first taken part in the fixture 41 years earlier—-and he scored 74. His last first-class match was in 1908, and his last match of all was played a few days before the start of the 1914-1918 war. It was for Eltham against Grove Park. As Bernard Darwin; in his biography of Grace, puts it: “He made 31 runs on a fiery and impossible wicket, and the last bowlers who ever bowled to him could not get him out.” In all, Grace made 55,000 runs and took nearly 3000 wickets in first-class cricket. most of them in the first 30 vears of his career. He scored 126 centuries. Grace was a peculiarly British figure in one of the most exuberant periods of British history. One of his contemporaries was that most eminent Victorian, William Ewart Gladstone. It was said, however, that “W.G.” and not “W.E.G." was the best known figure of his day. Grace died in 1915, and the then Bishop of Hereford said of him: “Had Grace been born in ancient Greece, the Iliad would have been a feft e J r , snt A book - Ha d he liv ed in the Middle Ages, he would have been a Crusader? and would now have been lying with his legs crossed in some ancient abbey, having founded a great family. As he was born when the world was older, he was the bestknown of all Englishmen and King of that English game least spoilt by any form of vice.”

There will be some who watched the match at Lord’s this week who saw Grace. For them, Cardus has written: “Morning after morning the summer’s sun rose for him. and he went forth and trod fresh grass. Every springtime came and found him ready for cricket; when he was a boy he learned the game in a Gloucestershire orchard white with bloom. He grew in the sunshine and wind and rain; the elements became flesh with him’ Why did this natural man ever die 9 5? n £ uno wh en the trees behind the Nursery End at Lord’s are moving gently m the light, and cricketers are on the field with hours of the game before them—on these gracious mornings it is hard to understand why W.G. should not have been permitted to go on living on the ripe earth, playing the game he loved best until he was tired of it.”