Indeed, he was often pathetically reluctant to give offence or to dredge up old quarrels. His books of memoirs are utterly devoid of contentious material, and it is difficult to believe they could have any connection with the man who had been involved in so many confrontations on and off the field in England and Australia. It was almost as if he preferred to believe they had never happened. In old age, he was even unwilling to get involved in nominating his greatest XI, a harmless exercise if ever there was one, for fear of giving offence to someone. Behind that brooding, off-putting facade there may have lurked a rather uncertain personality.
He could also be tolerance itself, especially if children were involved. When he arrived at the county ground, Bristol, one morning in 1896 for a match starting at 11.30 a.m., there was already a crowd of about thirty boys waiting outside. He opened the door himself and the boys asked if they could pay him. He let them in and told them to go back and pay when the gates opened. As he walked off, he asked his companion and team-mate, Robert Price, ‘Think they’ll come back and pay?’ Price replied, ‘I don’t think they will.’
‘No, I shouldn’t,’ replied W.G., laughing.
When a visitor to Bristol paid for his family to get into the ground at Clifton under the mistaken impression it was Clifton Zoo, the gatekeeper refused to give him his money back. Spotting W.G.’s unmistakable face, the man went up to him and told him of his error. W.G. took him back to the gate, made the keeper refund him and pointed out the correct way to get to the zoo.
As he grew older he became more and more autocratic. His family virtually founded Gloucestershire County Cricket Club and were instrumental in making it an instant success and leading it to a glorious first decade of existence never since equalled. He captained the team for twenty-nine years but would not change his selection policy or his way of doing things when the county hit bad times in the late 1880s and early 1890s. The subsequent parting of the ways was inevitable, for he was never a man to compromise.
Not only did he quit Gloucestershire County Cricket Club, he left the county of his birth, and the practice of medicine, for ever and moved to London. The abruptness of his departure is intriguing. Did he ever really enjoy being a doctor? Did he perhaps go into medicine out of a sense of family duty? His father and three older brothers were doctors and it seems to have been considered inevitable that W.G. would follow suit. Whether he was ever consulted about it is another matter.
His medical studies took him the best part of a decade to complete, which is hardly surprising given that at the same time he was in his prime as a cricketer and made two overseas tours. But even so it does not speak of great aptitude for the work. He practised medicine in Bristol for nearly two decades, mainly in the winter, for he continued to play cricket during the summers with undiminished enthusiasm, and was greatly loved by his patients. But at the age of fifty-one he gave it up at short notice and never went back to it.
This was premature by any standards. His father and brothers, for example, practised medicine almost until their dying days. In various memoirs, W.G. never wrote a word about his medical work and does not seem to have missed it at all, particularly once his financial future was secure, thanks to his second testimonial. Perhaps he went along with the study of medicine in the 1870s out of respect for the memory of his father, Dr Henry Grace, who died in 1871, and felt free to abandon a doctor’s labours after the death of his eldest brother, Henry junior, in 1895.
He was not a complicated man. Like most of the Grace brothers, he adored practical jokes and schoolboy japes, even in his fifties. His idea of a lark was to suggest to his fellow-players staying at the Grand Hotel, Bournemouth, to race up the stairs to the top of the hotel and back, the last man to stand drinks all round – and this at one o’clock in the morning. He took part, naturally, and did not have to pay for the round. Then they did it all over again, to the consternation of the other guests, who by now thought the hotel must be on fire. As several of his contemporaries noted, he was really just an overgrown schoolboy. Indeed, he was never happier than in the company of children. One of his granddaughters remembered sitting on his knee and tying ribbons in his beard, to his huge amusement.
He left Bristol for ever in 1899 but there were many in the city nearly half a century later in the 1930s who could still remember Dr Grace on his rounds putting down his bag and joining in a snowball fight with the local boys, or an impromptu game of cricket. He would round up a few youths to bowl at him in his garden or before an innings on the county ground, always tipping them generously. For while he was notorious for demanding and getting what he thought he was worth as a cricketer he was equally free in dispensing his money to anyone, young or old, who did him a favour. When a youth found his purse in the street and took it to his surgery, W.G. gave him the purse and all the money in it, which was enough to buy the lad a new suit.
He seems to have spent his life in perpetual motion. When he wasn’t playing cricket or attending to his patients, he was out following the beagles or, in later life, playing golf or bowls. He adored beagling, a recreation he pursued all his life (he had to give up riding to hounds when he got too heavy for a horse). His stamina was remarkable and so was his strength, as one Gloucestershire farmer discovered when he tried to block W.G. from pursuing the beagles into his fields. W.G. simply picked up the man, tucked him under his arm and strode across his land, depositing him on the other side with a threat to smack his bottom if he misbehaved himself further. When another farmer rejoiced at the sight of W.G. falling headlong into a ditch as he raced after the dogs, W.G. got up, grabbed him and sat him down in the water too. ‘He picked me up as if I’d been a new-born baby,’ the farmer is said to have remarked wonderingly when told the identity of his huge assailant.
Such stories are all part of the Grace legend, and there are a thousand such anecdotes about his cricketing life which have gone into the game’s folklore. Many of them involve Tom Emmett, the doughty Yorkshire left-arm seam bowler who was involved in many a long battle with W.G. ‘He ought to have a littler bat,’ was his comment during one epic innings. Another left-armer who came in for a lot of punishment from W.G. was Nottinghamshire’s James Shaw, who made the immortal remark: ‘I puts ’em where I likes, and he puts ’em where he likes.’
The commonest perception of W.G., which persists to this day, is that he was a cheat, that he bent the rules to suit himself, and would simply ignore an umpire’s decision if he did not agree with it. ‘He would stretch the laws of cricket uncommonly taut in his own favour,’ wrote Lord Hawke, ‘but nobody bore him a grudge.’ Whether W.G. behaved very differently from anybody else playing then or now is a moot point. I was writing some of this book to the accompaniment of the radio commentary on the climax of the first Test between Zimbabwe and England in December 1996, when Zimbabwe deliberately bowled wide to prevent the England batsmen from scoring the last few vital runs. I have no doubt that had W.G. been captaining the fielding side in such a situation he would have ordered his bowlers to behave in a similar fashion.
He played to win, although he could accept defeat gracefully. He undoubtedly tried to intimidate umpires into giving marginal decisions in his favour but, again as I write, the England team in Zimbabwe has just been warned by the match referee for that very offence. When Gloucestershire played Essex at Leyton in 1898, W.G. infuriated the Essex fielders as the game built up towards a tight finish by refusing to accept the umpire’s initial verdict of ‘out’ for what he thought was a bump-ball return catch. On that occasion, the umpire backed down, but just as frequently umpires did not, sending W.G. on his way despite his grumbles. Once he enquired, as he left the wicket, which leg the umpire thought the ball had struck for an lbw decision. ‘Never mind which leg,’ replied the umpire. ‘I’ve given you out and out you’ve got to go.’
To another umpire who had also given him out leg before, W.G. complained, ‘I played that ball.’
‘Yes,’ retorted