The central gate pillar, made from Portland
stone, carries the memorial inscription. It reads:
To the
memory of
William Gilbert
Grace
The Great Cricketer
1848 - 1915
These gates were
erected (by) the MCC
and other friends
and admirers
On the top of the pillar is a monogram of W G
Grace's initials and above that is some intricate stone carving that has a set
of cricket stumps and bails at the front.
The gates and memorial are Grade II listed and
the entry, at English Heritage (visit
link), reads:
"Gates and flanking walls and piers, erected
as a memorial to W G Grace in 1923 by Herbert Baker. Cast-iron gates set within
exedra of Portland stone. Two pairs of gates topped with motif of cricket ball
surrounded by sun's rays, either side of central pier with single triglyph of
cricket stumps under urn with English lion. In centre an inscription: 'TO THE
MEMORY OF WILLIAM GILBERT GRACE THE GREAT CRICKETER: 1848-1915: THESE GATES WERE
ERECTED: THE MCC AND OTHER FRIENDS AND ADMIRERS'. The gates set within an exedra
of curved walls with moulded cornice and base. Piers with urns; swags and
voussoirs over low doors giving pedestrian access to either side. W G Grace
played first-class cricket for 43 years. He was the unrivalled champion of
English cricket in the late nineteenth century when the game was established in
its present form."
The ANC Cricket website (visit
link) carries a biography for Grace:
"It is more than 150 years since WG Grace
was born, but there are other ways of measuring how distant he is in time. For
one thing, no one still alive, not even Jim Swanton, can remember seeing him
play (although in Sort Of A Cricket Person, EWS notes that "I am supposed to
have watched [him] from my perambulator on the Forest Hill ground round 1910").
Eight decades have passed since Grace died, yet he dogs us still, demanding our
attention at regular intervals.
The statistics of his career are alone enough to explain why - more than 54,000
first-class runs (there are at least two different versions of the precise
figure, so let's leave it at that) spread across 44 seasons, including 839 in
just eight days of 1876, when he hit a couple of triple-centuries, and only one
other batsman managed to top a thousand runs in the entire season; a thousand in
May in 1895, when he was nearly 47; and 2800-odd wickets costing less than 18
runs apiece. I suppose we might wonder why his bowling average wasn't even more
impressive, given the ropey pitches on which Dr Grace played. No modern
cricketer would deign to turn out on them, which makes his batting all the more
wondrous, and comparisons with Bradman or anyone since quite pointless.
But there was not that much to Grace apart from these skills and his devotion to
his family. A hand of whist appears to have marked the limit of his capacity for
cerebration, and if one wished to be rude to suburbia one might identify Grace
as suburban man incarnate, fluctuating mentally as well as physically between
the fringes of Bristol and the London Counties, ultimately coming to rest in
Eltham. His one inherited asset was that he came from a clan which was dotty
about a great game and dutiful (but in some cases no more) about the general
practice of medicine, with no doubt in its collective mind which came first at
all times and in all places. His brother EM Grace, who was a coroner, once had a
corpse put on ice until he could attend to it at close of play, and WG himself
must have had one of the most prolonged medical trainings in history because he
so frequently interrupted it in order to exercise his major talent at the
crease. He began to study as a bachelor of 19, and was a father of three in his
thirties before taking his final qualification at Westminster Hospital. His most
conspicuous act as a doctor is thought to have occurred when an unfortunate
fieldsman impaled himself on the boundary fence at Old Trafford.
It was simply because the cricketing Grace totally dominated his own era that an
exasperated CLR James could not understand why standard history books of the
period never mentioned him. This man, for heaven's sake, opened for England at
the age of 50 - and at the age of 18 he had scored 224 not out for England
against Surrey, in a match which he left halfway through in order to win a
quarter-mile hurdles championship at the Crystal Palace! No wonder he was the
best-known Englishman apart from Mr Gladstone, so much so that Evelyn Waugh's
friend, Monsignor Ronnie Knox, waggishly suggested that Gladstone and Grace were
really one and the same celebrity.
Athletic is not a word that obviously comes to mind when contemplating Grace in
his prime, though a slim young man did precede the pot-bellied genius, who in
middle age was far too heavy for any horse to bear. I have often wondered how
stylishly he played his strokes ever since I saw some film in which he appeared
to be brandishing his bat as though he was about to poke the fire with it.
Something tells me that he never hit the ball as gracefully as Victor Trumper
did in the famous photo of his straight drive; Grace, I suspect, was much more
about power than aesthetics.
That, at any rate, would fit what we know of his character in general. Apart
from tenderness to his relatives and a generous soft spot for children, he was
not, I think, a particularly attractive man, though he could sometimes (and it
is usually recorded as remarkable) encourage a young player on his own side with
- as the saying went in his day - bluff good humour. After the Australians had
experienced him for the first time, a commentator Down Under observed that, "For
so big a man, he is surprisingly tenacious on very small points." He was
notorious for employing, in order to pursue victory or personal achievement, a
variety of wiles and tricks that may be thought of as, well, hardly cricket. He
was also, throughout his career, quite breathtakingly grasping when his eye
caught the glint of hard cash.
It was the social historian Eric Midwinter who, some years ago, pointed out that
on Grace's first tour of Australia in 1873-74 (when he was a medical student
simultaneously enjoying his honeymoon) he extracted a fee of £1500 from the
organisers, which would be well over £100,000 at present values. On his second
tour in 1891-92, one-fifth of the entire cost of transporting 13 English
cricketers across the world, supporting them in Australia and paying them for
what they did there, went into Grace's pocket. He regularly collected
testimonials - one, worth £1458, was organised by MCC so that he might buy a
medical practice - and overall probably took something like £1 million in
today's currency out of the game; and, remember, there was no sponsorship nor
endorsements in those days to inflate a star's income. This was in a period when
the prosperous middle classes were earning no more than £1000 a year, a highly
skilled artisan £200, and a labourer half as much if he was lucky. A good
professional county cricketer in the second half of the 19th century saw his
wages rise from £100 to £250. No wonder it cost twice as much to get into some
English grounds if Grace was playing than if he was not.
The astonishing thing about the mercenary Grace, of course, is that he was
classified and has ever since been glorified as an amateur. Nothing more exposed
the humbug that used to smother the entire topic of Gents v Players than an
examination of Grace's financial rewards from the game; and nothing more reveals
the intellectual dishonesty at the heart of the humbug than something Grace once
said when trying to argue the Gloucestershire committee into playing more
amateurs than professionals. He declared his fear for the future of cricket if
it became wholly professional. "Betting and all kindred evils will follow in its
wake, and instead of the game being followed up for love, it will simply be a
matter of £ s d." Prophetic words, perhaps; but it ill became WG Grace to mouth
them.
It will be gathered from the above that he has never been a hero of mine, not
since the day in adolescence when I discovered that he was sometimes a shameless
cheat in a game that, I was being asked to believe, was wholly honourable. I
shall nevertheless drink to his memory on July 18 because his tremendous gifts,
especially his phenomenal batting, were largely responsible for the elevation of
cricket from just another 19th-century game, which had become popular partly
because it lent itself to gambling.
Grace's towering presence, more than any other single factor, transformed it
into the unrivalled spectator sport of summer, first of all in England,
subsequently in other lands spread widely across the world. I would even suggest
that a true measurement of WG's unique stature is that he is instantly
identifiable, even by some who are uninterested in his vocation, by his initials
alone. I cannot think of another human being in any sphere, not even WC Fields,
of whom this is also true."