No athlete in history has done so much to change the course of a sport as WG Grace. His achievements were on such a spectacular scale, and he became so overpowering a national figure, that it is instructive to compare him to Benjamin Disraeli. Both men reached national pre-eminence in the late 1860s: Disraeli when he succeeded Lord Derby as Tory leader; Grace when he burst onto the scene as a sportsman of unsurpassed brilliance. Both used their own astonishing gifts, bordering on genius, to rescue moribund British institutions.
The Tory Party was facing the prospect of slow extinction when Disraeli became leader. It found it hard to attract any audience beyond the shires and seemed doomed to irrelevance till Disraeli made it a national party with an appeal not just to landed gentry but also the middle classes and even to working men. Grace achieved something similar with cricket, expanding the constricted amateur interpretation of the sport for the benefit of the wider nation.
Both cases are paradoxical. Disraeli and Grace were outsiders. Disraeli was urban, with Jewish heritage, literary, brilliant – everything the Tory Party wasn’t and much that it despised. His natural home was probably as a mid-Victorian radical. The same applied to Grace, whose grandparents were domestic servants. He did not belong to the amateur elite, and it always regarded him with suspicion and resentment.
His talent was so staggering, and generated such a following, that he was able to set his own terms for participation. He elected to join England’s cricket establishment, thereby saving it – and preserving its ideology that amateurs were the highest exponents of the game and its natural leaders. In exchange, the establishment allowed him to make staggering sums for playing cricket without any of the social stigma attached to being a professional sportsman. In so doing, he also embedded hypocrisy at the heart of the game, where it remains to this day. Disraeli struck the same sort of deal with the Conservative Party.
Statistics show how Grace towered over his contemporaries. One is the longevity of his first-class career, with an unmatched span of 44 years. Four English batters stand ahead of his total of runs: Jack Hobbs, Frank Woolley, Patsy Hendren and Phil Mead. All were from a later generation and played most of their innings on better pitches. Only Woolley was a bowler as well. It is easy to forget Grace the bowler (initially brisk roundarm medium, later guileful slows) but only nine bowlers have taken more career wickets and just two, Wilfred Rhodes and JT Hearne, had any overlap with him, both in the later part of his career. Of any contemporary, Rhodes alone approaches Grace’s total of catches, second only to Woolley’s.
Grace was 18 when he scored his first century (a double, undefeated, one) for MCC against Surrey. He was excused from appearing on the last day, so he could run – and win – a national athletics trophy for the 400-yard hurdles. Five years later he was the first batter to score 2000 first-class runs in an English season, with an average of 78. The next average (of the highly regarded Richard Daft) was 37.
By 1875, aged 27, he had scored his 50th first-class century. No other batter had approached this, and none would reach it younger until Walter Hammond, by seven weeks, in 1930. While Grace was making his 50 hundreds, his contemporaries managed a total of 109 (the nearest competitor, hard-drinking Harry Jupp of Surrey, assembled 12). Grace scored nearly a third of all the centuries made in his first decade of first-class cricket. Not even Don Bradman, who completed a century in over a third of his first-class innings, ever achieved that superiority over his contemporaries.
There is endless testimony, especially from the leading bowlers of the time, to his stamina, technique and shot selection, especially his ability to play equally well off front or back foot, on any pitch against all types of bowling. He benefited from another innovation in cricket technology: the light cane-handled bat. His father and maternal uncle gave him one and taught him to play straight with it, rather than hit across the line with the club used by his elder brother, EM. Aided by his height (at 6 foot 2 inches, about nine inches taller than the average for a late Victorian male), his magnificent physique and, of course, the black beard that was his gift to artists, he carried an aura to the wicket that would later be attributed to Bradman, Garfield Sobers and Ben Stokes.
Grace on his own was enough to sustain and animate a team. The greatest beneficiaries were the Gentlemen in their regular contests against the Players. Their last 20 matches before Grace produced 19 defeats and one draw. In Grace’s first decade, the Players won only three times, five matches were drawn and 18 won by the Gentlemen, and he had made the fixture England’s prime cricket attraction. HS Altham hailed his impact on it as the most remarkable feature of his “monumental history”.
Grace was not the first sportsman to become a nationally recognised figure: the boxers Tom Cribb, Jack Broughton and Tom Sayers preceded him. But he was certainly the first cricketer, and his longevity and international performances made him a representative of English character and, in the long Victorian peace, helped sport to replace war as an indicator of English superiority over foreigners. At the outset, the queen’s long seclusion following the death of Prince Albert made him almost a substitute monarch.
Newspapers made it easier to read about him; railways made it easier to see him than any previous idol. Indeed, Grace’s domestic career was made possible by railways, which enabled him to combine first-class engagements as a nominal amateur with lucrative non-first-class personal appearances. In his busy 1873 English season, he played 20 first-class games: 19 in London, the others in Kent, Gloucestershire, Hove and Sheffield. He also played 23 non-first-class matches, but only four in London. The others took him to Gloucestershire, Kent, Hertford, Oxford, Darlington, Salford, Northampton, Lincoln and Scotland. He finished his match in Lincoln on 6 September and promptly took off by train for Inverness.
Grace was the first sportsman to be used regularly to sell newspapers and magazines. He also pioneered the sale of non-sports goods. In the 1890s, an image of him stepping out from a pavilion was captioned “Colman’s Mustard Like Grace Heads the Field”. His image was still used after his death, appropriately to promote the Stamina brand of self-supporting trousers in the 1920s.
Grace was the first English sports performer of international repute. This enabled him to extract the staggering sum of £1,500 as “expenses” for his first tour of Australia, in 1873-74, a sum that represented over 20 years’ wages for a skilled tradesman. Grace also managed to secure a free first-class honeymoon for his wife, Agnes. The professionals on the tour received a basic £150 and £20 spending money. For his second tour, in 1891-92, his expenses were doubled and two of their children – Bessie, aged 13, and Charles, aged nine – joined him and Agnes. Just as railways had enabled his domestic career, the steamship and the Suez Canal facilitated his international appearances. En route to his second tour of Australia, he became the first great cricketer to play in Malta and then in Ceylon, on a stopover in Colombo. After a cameo, he for once agreed with the umpire that he was out and went to rest in the shade.
The privileges of amateurism
Grace’s paternal grandparents were both in domestic service. His grandfather had figured as a sinister butler worthy of Victorian melodrama in a celebrated fraud trial. Grace’s widowed grandmother had escaped the resulting stigma by opening a school. Their son achieved respectability by becoming a doctor. Grace’s mother, Martha Grace, was the daughter of an eccentric private-school proprietor who experimented with kite-powered carriages, published radical pamphlets and quarrelled with the local leaders of his Methodist faith.
Both of Grace’s parents had a huge influence over their four sons. It was unthinkable for them to compromise their hard-won social ascent by becoming professional sportsmen.
At this distance, it is hard to understand the intensity of the Victorian taboo against being a professional sportsman, or even training and practising like one. It was in part a hangover from the Georgian era in which sportsmen were part of the domestic household of their aristocratic patrons (typically cricketers as gardeners, pugilists as bodyguards, and jockeys as stable lads and coachmen). As noted already, it also had an overlay of the new public-school ethics, which exalted playing sport in the right spirit above the pursuit of victory and reward. The 1850s onward were a great era for forming sports clubs, and most of these went to extraordinary lengths to define who was eligible for membership as an amateur and a gentleman. Britain’s rowers needed three separate organisations, for gentlemen, tradesmen and professional watermen respectively.
Grace was never a full member of the cricketing or any other establishment. In spite of his role in the revival of the Gentlemen, he was not appointed captain until there was no alternative: he was also a delayed choice as captain of England. Although he played frequently against I Zingari, he was never asked to represent them or to join any other elite wandering club. He was often the object of snobbery and mocking comments on his West Country accent or dirty neck. Although he was the saviour of the MCC, the club never offered him any influential position (only eventually the status of life membership). He never received any official honour, although Herbert Henry Asquith included him in 1911 among the 500 or so men proposed as peers to force through the Parliament Bill and Lloyd George’s radical People’s Budget. Grace, a lifelong Conservative, was a curious choice: perhaps he was put there to reassure the new king, George V, who had reluctantly agreed to the mass creation.
Grace did not go to public school or Oxbridge. But even that might not have guaranteed passage into the cricket establishment. Many gifted amateurs from public school and Oxford or Cambridge never achieved this either, including CB Fry, Archie MacLaren, Gilbert Jessop, Percy Fender and later Trevor Bailey. All of these picked up some undefined black mark. Grace’s public behaviours gave the establishment ample grounds for his exclusion.
One was his appetite for money. His career earnings as an official amateur were estimated at £120,000.20 Applying that sum to his final first-class year, 1908, it has a present-day purchasing power of about £18.4 million. In 1879, some committee members of his county, Gloucestershire, which was virtually a family fiefdom, nerved themselves to attempt to cut his expenses and those of his brothers. They were rebuffed. In the same year, John Lillywhite’s Cricketers’ Companion (an early competitor to Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack) accused him of making more profit from cricket than any professional. The MCC, which had connived in his amateur status, denied the charge with a blustering lack of conviction and gave him a testimonial that raised £1458 and some silver artefacts. Its present purchasing power would be about £230,000. A second testimonial in 1895 (his late annus mirabilis) raised a further £9000, including contributions from the Queen and the Prince of Wales.
It is instructive to compare these figures to the benefits obtained by leading professionals in Grace’s time. Counties had no obligation to give them, and some set difficult qualifying conditions or refused them altogether. The biggest benefit before the First World War went to George Hirst of Yorkshire: £3703 in 1904. The batter Grace admired most (apart from himself), Arthur Shrewsbury, got £900 in two benefits. The bowler who dismissed him more often than any other, Alfred Shaw, had a disastrous benefit of just £130 in 1892 (to his credit, Grace topped it up with the proceeds of one of his own second testimonial matches).
As an official amateur, Grace got away with conduct for which a professional would have been severely punished. Incidents were either hushed up (as with his potentially criminal assault on a teenage boy) or weaved into a suitable part of his legend (“larger than life character”… “endearing rogue”… “monarch of the game”… “hearty, natural Englishman”). His regular gamesmanship, intimidation of umpires, exploitations of his personal authority and earning power were all excused in such ways. They caused no concern to the young Clement Attlee, who told the Cricket Society towards the end of his life that for him and his schoolfellows “cricket was a religion and WG stood next to the Deity”.
The Labour leader and prime minister might have added that had WG Grace chosen a different path, and remained loyal to the social class from which he emerged, he could have revolutionised the game. In the process, he would not simply have made a fortune for himself, but improved the economic circumstances of his fellow cricketers, too. Although he could be personally generous with his immense wealth, he chose not to do this. WG Grace’s cricketing achievement was prodigious. It was also selfish. He turned cricket into a Tory sport and his spirit lives on today.
Without Grace’s decision to claim amateur status, one can conceive of an alternative direction for cricket – one in which league cricket would have come to dominate the English game using the same model as football. Long-form cricket might not have come into being at all, nor become recognised as the game’s supreme form. Short-form competitive cricket would have been the version exported to the Empire – and thus used for international matches.
With no reward or reverence for the amateur, talented players would have found less stigma in joining the professional ranks. Cricket could have had a very different influence on the English class system as a whole, rewarding entrepreneurship and achievement, rather than inherited status and social shibboleths.
