Gilbert: The Last Years of WG Grace

by Charlie Connelly

  ‘Goodnight, Doctor,’ said Preston, ‘see you there at eleven sharp.’

  The next morning Preston arrived at the ground in his car on the stroke of eleven o’clock to find no cricket played after an earlier rain shower had delayed the start. Grace bustled over to meet him.

  ‘Harry, my dear chap,’ he beamed. ‘The start of play has been delayed very slightly but I still intend to ride with you to Brighton.’

  Preston pulled out his watch and reminded the Champion that he intended to leave at noon.

  ‘And I intend to be with you in your contraption when you do,’ said Grace, just as the rain began to fall again.

  Three hours passed, punctuated by showers that set the start of play back further each time. Preston resigned himself to the fact that they would leave when W.G. was ready and not before. Grace knew what Preston knew – that having W.G. Grace as a passenger in his car for a journey between two of his hotels was too great an opportunity to miss for the sake of a stern look from his wife when he arrived.

  Finally, at 2.30 p.m., Grace strode out to open the innings with Hampshire’s Charles Robson, having assured Preston they would be in Brighton before the day was out. The Old Man played the first over carefully, not scoring any runs and by the fourth over the score had reached seven with Grace still on nought. The first ball of Ted Dennett’s next over was slightly overpitched on off stump and the old craftsman drove it emphatically to long-on for four. The crowd murmured its approval and applauded warmly. This was what they’d come to see. The second ball was on a good length and not particularly dangerous, but to the stunned amazement of the crowd the Champion patted a simple catch back to the bowler, who clutched the ball to his chest and looked around as if he couldn’t quite believe what had just happened. Grace was already on his way back to the pavilion, head down, bat under arm, gloves coming off, almost before Dennett had taken the catch. As he strode off he caught sight of Preston.

  ‘Terrible luck, Harry,’ he called out. ‘The ball must have hit a loose piece of earth and popped up. Still, on the bright side, at least I’ll be able to join you on the run to Brighton. I shall be with you presently.’

  And with that he disappeared into the pavilion. Preston was pleased: there was no greater publicist in the hotel business than he, and shuttling arguably the most recognisable person in the land between his hotels in his new automobile, well, you couldn’t put a price on that kind of exposure, but he did feel a pang of guilt that the wily old goat had rather pulled a fast one on the crowd who had in the most part turned up to see him bat. At least he’d hit one ball to the boundary before lobbing up that dolly to Dennett, but otherwise, well, there were a few sixpences in the gateman’s tray whose erstwhile owners may have been rueing their parting.

  Ten minutes later the Doctor appeared, changed into his grey worsted suit and matching cap, carrying his cricket bag in one hand and his travelling bag in the other. He was grinning.

  ‘See, Harry?’ he said quietly as he placed his luggage in the back of the car. ‘Told you I’d be ready.’

  Preston took out his watch, looked at it, looked at his passenger, raised an eyebrow, opened the little door to the passenger seat and the Old Man hauled himself up on to the step.

  ‘You’re definitely not staying to see the match through to its conclusion, Doctor?’ asked Preston knowingly, as Grace’s considerable backside hovered in front of his face.

  ‘These lads will manage fine without me, Harry,’ he said as he settled into the passenger seat. ‘There’s not much I can do from the pavilion. And, anyway, Charlie Fry is there and there’s no better man to leave in charge of things than him.’

  Preston cranked the handle at the front of the car and the engine spluttered into life. The Old Man gripped the door with both hands, a little unsettled by the vibrations and the noise. Preston hopped up into the driver’s seat.

  ‘Don’t worry, Doctor,’ he said over the sound of the engine, ‘it’s perfectly safe.’

  He wrenched the car into gear, grasped the steering wheel with both hands and eased the vehicle into motion. It lurched slightly, and Grace found himself rocking back and forth in his seat. It was an unnerving sensation: he was high up on the vehicle, it was open and a long way from the ground. Used to either trains or cabs, he felt that being in motion like this he should either be enclosed in a carriage or at the very least regarding the rear ends of a couple of sturdy horses clopping away wearily in front of him.

  ‘What do you think, Doctor?’ said Preston as the car pulled out of the cricket ground and on to the main road. He didn’t answer. He couldn’t answer: he didn’t know how he felt yet, this was unlike anything he had ever experienced before.

  As they chugged out of Bournemouth and into the New Forest, however, he started to relax and enjoy himself.

  ‘This is a fine way to travel, Harry!’ he said eventually over the noise of the engine, clamping his hat to his head in order to stop it blowing away.

  ‘It’s the future, Doctor!’ came the reply.

  After a journey of around four hours the car pulled on to Brighton seafront, headed towards the Palace Pier and parked outside the entrance of the Royal York Hotel bathed in evening sunshine. The engine died but it took the Old Man a while for his ears to adjust to the absence of engine noise. His face felt flushed from the wind and his rear end ached from being seated on a thin cushion for hours on end but he had found the journey intriguingly enjoyable.

  Preston helped him down from the passenger seat and the Old Man stepped back to look at the car. It still appeared outlandish to him, as if it was somehow incomplete. It looked wrong without horses in front: to think that all the power of propulsion came from in that little box at the front. With its curves and plush upholstery, noisy engine and sturdy chassis, it was a strange hybrid of elegance and function. This was really the future? He pursed his lips doubtfully, retrieved his bags from the rear of the car and waited for Preston to show him to his room.

  ‘Did you enjoy the ride then, Doctor?’ he asked.

  ‘Very much, Harry, thank you,’ said Grace. ‘I would certainly like to ride with you again sometime.’

  Later that evening, after dinner, he stepped out to take the sea air. Having crossed the road and descended the steps to the beach, he mashed his way across the pebbles until he reached the lapping waves gently washing the stones in front of him. Aside from the chain of lights strung along the Palace Pier all was dark from the water shifting in front of him to the beach that stretched out either side of him to the sky. But for a few wispy clouds the night was clear and the stars were spread above him in a beautiful canopy. Such opportunities for solitude had always been rare, but then he’d never really cared much for solitude. It was probably this rare opportunity to be alone with his thoughts that made him think of Arthur Shrewsbury. How he could have done with Arthur today rather than the raggle-taggle eleven he’d scraped together for the game at Bournemouth. Arthur would have made the difference; his was always the first name that came to mind whenever he was asked to put a team together. There was no finer batsman on a sticky wicket than Arthur, and his 164 for England in 1886 against Australia with Spofforth in full cry would last long in the memory of all who saw it. Even the Champion himself had to admit that Shrewsbury was probably the finest batsman in the land for a time during the eighties.

  It was two years now since poor Arthur took his own life. It didn’t seem like it. At the end of the 1902 season he’d complained of kidney pains and had spent an uncomfortable winter, barely able to walk at times, Grace had heard. Yet a stream of doctors could find nothing wrong with him: even a London specialist to whom he’d made a special journey in February couldn’t diagnose the problem. It was then that Shrewsbury realised there was little chance of him playing serious cricket in the coming season.

  On 22 May he’d gone into Jackson’s gunsmiths in Nottingham and bought a revolver and some ammunition. A week later he’d returned, complaining he couldn’t load the weapon and le
arned he’d bought the wrong bullets. The shop exchanged them for the correct ones and he’d gone home to his lodgings where his lady friend Gertrude was waiting, concerned about his mood. That afternoon he’d said to her, ‘I shall be in the churchyard before many more days are up’, and she’d scolded him for talking in such a way.

  He seemed to have cheered up a little by the evening and when he sent Gertrude downstairs to make him a cup of cocoa she thought he’d come out of his funk. While in the kitchen she heard a loud noise from upstairs. She went into the hallway and called up to him, asking what had happened.

  ‘Nothing,’ was the response and she returned to the kitchen. Seconds later there was another loud report and when Gertrude rushed upstairs she found Shrewsbury in bed, insensible, having first shot himself in the chest and then in the temple. She ran for the doctor but by the time he arrived Shrewsbury was dead.

  The inquest recorded the verdict as suicide brought on by the belief that he was suffering from a serious illness even though the coroner could find absolutely nothing physically wrong with him.

  The Old Man stood in the darkness by the sea and tried to imagine what might have been going through Arthur’s mind. The realisation that he wouldn’t be playing much in the way of cricket that season must have been a terrible blow. Having soldiered through the winter suffering from these crippling pains, the thought of the coming sun-blessed days on the cricket field must have been the only thing keeping the old boy going, he thought. When that was taken away from him he just couldn’t face the prospect of a life of constant pain, but mostly he couldn’t face the prospect of a life without ‘the moment’, that beautiful, exultant time when the ball left the bowler’s hand on its way to you and nothing else mattered.

  He felt a fleeting pang of guilt. Today he had deliberately thrown away his wicket in order to join Harry Preston in his motor car. Today he had taken the game for granted, the game that could conceivably have saved Arthur’s life. Arthur would have given anything to have been at that wicket today.

  There was still a good deal of batting left in Arthur Shrewsbury, he mused. If he could have just got past that evening when it seemed that all was futile and lost, he could even have been down here on the south coast with him, looking forward to the Hastings Festival and talking about what kind of wicket it might be.

  Standing there alone, as a few drops of rain began to fall, he could almost sense Arthur next to him, in cricket whites and dark blue blazer, hands in his trouser pockets.

  ‘A sticky one tomorrow, I’d say, Gilbert,’ he half heard. ‘I think I should like to open.’

  He looked back up at the stars and relished for a minute how small they made him feel, how insignificant, then turned his back on the sea and crunched back up the beach towards the bright lights of the hotel.

  Tuesday 18 July 1906

  As soon as the ball came off the bat he let out a frustrated, strangled yelp. It had kept lower than he’d anticipated and come off the bottom of the blade. If he’d middled it, it would have ended up comfortably in the crowd. This wasn’t his bat, it was George Beldam’s, and while he’d admired it every time he’d seen it and had been anxious to get his hands on it, on this occasion craftsmanship alone couldn’t help him. The ball went in a curving arc towards Albert Trott at mid-off who took a comfortable catch. He looked across at the scoreboard: he’d made 74, a pretty decent effort all told. As he tucked his bat under his arm and pulled off his gloves the applause began to ring out as the Oval crowd stood as one. He was, he had to admit, exhausted. He’d set out to score at least 58, a run for each year of his life, and had passed that figure comfortably, but the last 20 runs or so had been hard, physically hard.

  He’d been through his reference books and notes and calculated that this was his 85th Gentlemen v Players match, 41 years after his first. This, the final day of the game, was also his 58th birthday which, everyone suspected, was the reason why he had been invited to captain the Gentlemen after an absence from the fixture of two years.

  As he dragged his enormous frame back towards the pavilion, a walk he’d made many times, usually against his will, he realised that he was actually looking forward to getting off the field. His footsteps were heavier than usual but the disappointment of getting out, especially to a mistimed shot, was, he realised, tinged with a sense of relief. His feet were sore and his legs almost trembled with tiredness: running between the wickets was becoming a real problem for him now. In fact, he wasn’t even ‘running’ as such any more; it was more of a lumber, a glorified hobble.

  When he stood at the wicket and took his stance he still felt as he did 40 years ago or more: that he was ready for anything and could achieve anything he desired. That familiar settling of the body, right foot behind and parallel with the crease, the left foot pointing slightly outwards towards the bowler, the bottom of his bat resting gently against the little toe of his right foot. Head upright, perfectly straight, looking down the wicket. As the bowler approached the crease he’d lift the ball of his left foot, leaving his heel on the ground, pick up the bat right over middle stump, feint as if he was briefly going to play a stroke as the ball left the bowler’s hand, and, when the ball was in the air, the exultant moment arrived when he truly felt ageless. That half a second or whatever it might be between the ball leaving the bowler’s hand and reaching him was the moment he still lived for. It was why he was still, even approaching 60, prepared to make long, uncomfortable train journeys to all parts of the country, put up with lumpy hotel beds, scan the newspapers and the skies for clues of approaching weather, climb rickety stairs to change in damp, draughty dressing-rooms, pull boots on to his gnarled old feet and walk out, bat in hand, on to whatever ground it happened to be that day. That moment, when it was just him and the ball, the ultimate, simplest duel, reading the trajectory, duetting with physics, watching for the spin, deducing whether to play forward or back, attack or defend, that’s what made everything worthwhile. The repeated, metronomic task of ball pitted against bat, when the rest of the world melted away, the aches of old age, the responsibilities of captaincy, the concerns for the make-up of the team, the machinations of committees, everything left his mind the moment that ball left the bowler’s hand. Then it was just the lightning calculations of his mind, the translation of those calculations into a decision, the transmission of that decision to his body, limbs, feet and hands and then the outcome of the decision, whether it be killing the ball stone dead with impenetrable defence, or sending it skimming away across the grass with a stroke timed so perfectly that he felt no vibrations in his hands.

  That moment, that repetitive, relentless, ritual of duelling, that was why he was still here, 58 years old, playing in one of the greatest matches in modern sport.

  This time he felt the vibrations in his arms – a curse on that crack in the pitch that had stopped him timing the shot right – as well as the aches in his feet and legs. He’d experienced that timeless, ageless moment of weightlessness and the complete mental mastery of his body for the last time in a Gentlemen v Players match.

  He approached the gate, acknowledging the tremendous ovation of the Oval crowd, and wearily climbed the steps, making his way to the dressing-room. He walked in, swung Beldam’s bat, dropped it on to the table and announced, ‘There, I shan’t play any more.’

  With that he sat down heavily on a bench under the peg from which his clothes hung while his team-mates filed past one by one, congratulating him, shaking his hand, slapping his shoulders and wishing him well.

  Finally he unbuckled his pads, kicked off his boots, placed his hands either side of him on the bench and looked down at his cricket bag. He closed his eyes and imagined himself back out there, the ball about to be bowled, to release him into the moment when such mortal concerns as age and weariness melt away to nothing.

  Monday 20 April 1908

  He pulled his thick, long-sleeved sweater over his head and unfurled it down his body until the heavy hem hung by his thighs. Stepping o
n to the balcony, he was hit by a wind cold enough to make him catch his breath, something that certainly didn’t improve the view. Where he was used to looking out across a sun-kissed Oval, the benches packed with boater-topped spectators, today there was barely a smattering of people in heavy coats and caps beneath grey scudding clouds. Even the grass, normally a verdant green, looked blue-grey.

  ‘What a day this is for cricket,’ he said as he surveyed the grim scene.

  The wind had begun in the Arctic, nature’s icicle-breath knifing its icy way across the fjords of Norway, picking up pace over the dark, white-tipped waters of the North Sea, skittering across the Fens and the flatlands of Norfolk and Suffolk and channelling itself up the Thames Estuary, skimming the gas holders and swooping across the Oval pitch to ruffle a long, greying beard. Its owner hunched his shoulders and thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his cricket whites.

  He turned back inside the dressing-room where the rest of the Gentlemen of England were arranging heavy sweaters on laps and dancing with the long sleeves as they readied themselves to pull them over their heads.

  ‘The summer game, eh, Doc?’ came a voice from somewhere beneath a thick layer of cable-knit, and everyone laughed.

  ‘I apologise, gentlemen, for losing the toss,’ he announced turning back to the room. ‘I am certain Surrey only chose to bat in order that the rest of their eleven could stay sitting around the fire.’

  There was a ripple of laughter but he wasn’t entirely sure whether he was joking or not.

  He looked back out of the window and estimated there were barely 1,500 spectators out there. In all his years in the game The Oval had never presented such a bleak prospect at the start of a match.

  At the same time he was aware this was most likely to be his last ever first-class match. He was leading what was essentially a London County side facing their customary season opener against Surrey, but as the London County club had long lost its status they had become the Gentlemen of England in order to keep the fixture first class. Even with the heavy and committed involvement of the greatest cricketer in the land, the failure of London County to be admitted to the County Championship and the inexplicable lack of consistent support from the local suburban population ensured that the club was in the process of easing its way into oblivion.