A steam tug emerged from under the bridge and sounded its whistle. A train pulled out of the station above, chuffing white smoke into the night sky. The old man turned away from the dark water and made his way back up the hill to the station.
Thursday 16 July 1914
He showed the man from the Morning Post into his office, invited him to take a seat and sat down at his desk. He rarely gave interviews, especially these days, but when the Post had approached him about marking his 66th birthday with a large feature he agreed readily, for he had a few opinions to share.
Eva brought in the tea tray, Grace asked after the man’s journey, he replied that it was fine but a longer walk from the station than he had anticipated, the tea was poured, they exchanged shared agreement about the growing seriousness of the international situation, the man pulled his notebook from his attaché case and they began.
‘I’ll commence with a big question if I may, Doctor,’ he said. ‘Are the cricketers of today better than those of the past? For example, modern critics often tell us that such bowlers as Barnes are better than any of their predecessors, and that footwork has revolutionised the art of modern batting.’
Grace thought for a moment and then leaned forward in his chair.
‘It would more sensible,’ he said, ‘to say “one of the best” instead of “the best” when the leading bowlers and batsmen of today are praised. After all, these critics do not remember the old days; why, they were not even born then. There are many more first-rate cricketers today than there were two generations or even a single generation ago. Naturally so; for much more cricket is played and there are so many more playing now, that the number of those who play well is necessarily larger than it used to be. But the best men of the past were easily as good, I should say, as the best men of the present.
‘Footwork is certainly not a new discovery,’ he continued. ‘The idea of teaching young batsmen not to move their right foot at the crease was to prevent them from drawing away towards short leg, which is in my opinion the worst of all batting faults and the worst of all weak batting habits. It means first of all that the bat is not held straight’ – he was out of his seat now, and had picked up a poker from the fire grate that he was employing as a bat – ‘and, secondly, that the batsman does not get over the ball, which is the secret of all successful batting.’
He was lunging forward now, playing a defensive shot with the poker, making the tea tray rattle, his head over where he imagined the ball to be. He held the shot steady, perfectly balanced. Even on the eve of his 66th birthday, even on the slippery rug in his office, everything was in the right place just as it had been under the watchful eye of Uncle Pocock and his mother back at Downend 60 years earlier.
He straightened, took a step backwards and sat down again, still holding the poker.
‘I believe firmly in good footwork and always have done, but pulling away from wicket and footwork are very different matters, very different indeed, and should not be confused. Footwork comes with experience, after a batsman has learned to take up a proper position at the crease and has the confidence to attack the ball.’
He was up out of his seat again and it struck the man from the Morning Post how light he was on his feet for a man of his age and size. The Champion swished up the poker in a perfect backlift, took a large step forward with his left foot, drew up his right, stepped forward again and swished the poker as if he were launching an errant lob high into the Lord’s Pavilion. The journalist felt the breeze as the poker passed a little closer to his ear than ideally he would have liked.
‘I do not for an instant suggest that a batsman should run out to every slow ball bowled to him,’ said Grace, warming further to his theme and pointing the poker at his visitor as he took his seat again, ‘but when a ball is bowled high in the air it is certainly a very good policy to go out and make it full pitch.’
The journalist drew breath to ask another question but his subject was not yet done with the first.
‘Again,’ he said, ‘in comparing the old players and those of today you must remember that the former did not have the same advantages as those playing today. The pitches were not nearly as good. I was only thinking the other day about how Lord’s was very bad at times during my younger days. There were no boundaries meaning every hit had to be run out, making the work of reaching a big score much harder then than it is now. Games were stopped for rain, but it was not customary in the old days to wait for the ground to dry, we just went out again as soon as the rain stopped even when the bowlers and fieldsmen could hardly keep their footing.
‘The game was never stopped for bad light, either, although there is some excuse for that innovation at Lord’s, for example, where the light is not as good as it was before the Mound Stand and the present Pavilion were built. Indeed, the same may be said of other grounds.’
He paused for a moment and gazed out of the window. The journalist tried to seize the moment, but again barely had a chance to draw breath before his interviewee was off again.
‘It does seem to me that there is not as much fun in first-class cricket as there used to be,’ he lamented. ‘County cricket is taken far too seriously these days. There is too much of it and it has become too much of a business. I think it would be a better competition if more amateurs were included in the county elevens. The man who can only play occasionally ought to have a chance of playing if he is really good.
‘There are too many first-class counties, too, I think, and it’s clear that some of these will not be able to stand the expense much longer. Personally I should like to see Gloucestershire and Somerset combine forces with half the home matches being played in each county. They would then have one strong side instead of two weak ones.’
And so the afternoon continued. The journalist gave up his planned interrogation and simply listened and scribbled silently while the Champion held forth with a torrent of opinion and suggestions on the improvement of the modern game, occasionally leaping up from his chair and playing more shots with the poker.
Two hours had passed before the man was able to extricate himself from his verbal machine-gunning. He would walk back to Eltham and Mottingham station, catch the train, begin rifling through the pages of notes he’d transcribed trying to work out how he was going to reduce it all to 1,200 words by deadline time, look out of the window at the terraced streets of south London whooshing by and realise that the conversation he’d just had was that of a man who’d not had such a conversation in a long time. He’d disembark at Charing Cross, make his way back to the office, dump his notes on to his desk and tell his colleagues about how this remarkable old cricketer had, on the eve of his 66th birthday, given him one of the most animated, detailed and fascinating interviews of his career.
When he sat down at his desk he recalled just how struck he’d been by the contrast between the tired, stooped, faintly ill-looking old man with whom he’d exchanged small talk about the prospects of war, and the giant, charismatic presence with sparkling eyes and the footsteps of a dancer, swishing a poker around a suburban study while his eyes shone and sparkled as he lost himself completely in the moment.
Saturday 25 July 1914
He was a week into his 67th year and feeling on top of the world as he walked from the wicket to the applause of the smattering of spectators around the boundary of the Grove Park ground on Marvels Lane, conveniently the closest pitch to his home aside from the pitches at the school for missionaries’ sons that had taken over the old Royal Naval College across the road from Fairmount.
He’d gone in at the fall of the fourth wicket when there had been barely 20 runs on the board. The sun was warm on his back, his bat felt light in his hands and his legs thrummed with an energy rarely felt in recent years. It had turned out to be one of those days when everything just seemed to go right. His footwork was as nimble as it had been in 30 years and his timing of the ball took older spectators back to the glory days of full houses at The Oval. He drove with immense po
wer, the bat coming down in a perfect arc, the middle of the bat meeting the ball and sending it skimming over the turf to the boundary.
With Eagleton first, then Henshall, he restored the Eltham score to a wholly respectable 155 for six when the declaration came at the tea interval. With his 69 not out the Champion had made nearly half the runs and he was beaming widely behind that vast grey beard as he walked back to the pavilion with an agility he could barely recognise.
It didn’t matter that this was Marvels Lane, Grove Park, rather than Lord’s. It didn’t matter that the opposition was a clubbable bunch of clerks, solicitors and the son of the local vicar rather than ‘the Demon’ Spofforth or Charlie Kortright. It didn’t matter that the game was watched by barely a hundred picnicking locals enjoying a hot Saturday afternoon in the sunshine for whom the cricket was incidental rather than a noisy capacity crowd at The Oval or the Melbourne Cricket Ground. As ever, once the ball left the bowler’s hand absolutely nothing mattered other than his duel with it. The years fell away, the occasion melted to nothing and there was just him and the ball, locked in a duel that on this occasion he won convincingly.
How he lived for those moments, when he wasn’t an aching, ageing, fading grey-bearded colossus whose body was not keeping up with the quickness of his mind and the vigour of his soul. What on earth would he ever do without them?
‘Well played, Father,’ he heard his son Charles saying as he reached the boundary, ‘well played.’
‘A shame you weren’t still out there with me, Charles,’ he replied, clapping his boy on the back with a giant, meaty hand.
‘There’ll be other occasions I’m sure. If I faced that ball a hundred more times I’d never nick it behind like that again,’ said Charles with a faint shrug.
‘There’s always next week, my boy. Always next week.’
He clumped up the wooden steps, turned into the dressing-room, dropped his bat and gloves on to his battered old leather cricket bag and sat down to unbuckle his pads. The way he felt at that moment he could have batted on all day and come back tomorrow and batted some more. But, yes, there was always next week.
Eltham worked hard in the field, the Old Man appealing from point for decisions he had no right to with the same gusto as ever, and Charles took four for 48, but Grove Park held on gamely for an honourable draw, finishing the day on 99 for eight. It was a most familiar scene as the players trooped off applauding the two batsmen who’d resolutely blocked out the final overs. White-clad figures in the golden evening light, their shadows growing longer on the grass, the thrumming of an afternoon’s exertions in their limbs, a church clock striking seven thirty, honours even, the cricketing gods satisfied, and among them a tall man in a white sunhat, a grey beard hanging down past his breastbone, shirt and trousers hanging more loosely than they once had, congratulating the batsmen and the bowlers, not least his own offspring, and thinking that this was about as perfect a day as he could remember for a long time.
W.G. Grace – the Champion, the Old Man, the Doctor, Gilbert – had just played the last innings of his life.
Tuesday 4 August 1914
‘Owing to the summary rejection by the German Government of the request made by his Majesty’s Government for assurances that the neutrality of Belgium will be respected, his Majesty’s Ambassador to Berlin has received his passports, and his Majesty’s Government declared to the German Government that a state of war exists between Great Britain and Germany as from 11 p.m. on August 4, 1914.’
Saturday 8 August 1914
As the afternoon moved wearily towards evening it became clear that he wouldn’t be required to bat. He was a little disappointed – it was after all the only significant contribution he could make to the team these days – but there was also a rare hint of relief. His mind had been occupied this week by thoughts of war and death. The build-up to the conflict with Germany had remained largely on the periphery of his priorities in recent weeks other than a mild concern about his son Edgar, a commander in the Royal Navy and currently preparing his ship, HMS New Zealand, for impending conflict, but the actual declaration of war unsettled him. War wasn’t something he understood particularly, not something that had ever impinged upon his life. The confident assertions of some that it would all be over by Christmas reassured him slightly but his world had been set askew on its axis. Normally his son Charles would have been here too but, now a qualified engineer, he had enlisted in the No. 4 Electric Light Company of the Kent Fortress Royal Engineers and had already motorcycled down to Sheerness where he was to oversee their coastal searchlights. Already it felt faintly wrong to be here, to be playing cricket in the sunshine while the nation prepared for war. Part of him thought that this scene, the cricketers on the field with the trees in the background, the men in straw boaters and the women with parasols strolling around the boundary, was in part what the country was fighting to preserve. But the fact there was fighting to be done – and that his sons would most probably be doing some of it – made this tranquil scene feel somehow inappropriate.
He didn’t fully understand the political and military ins and outs that had led to the conflict but he knew this was an issue for the entire nation. The more he looked out across the field at the familiar rhythms, rituals and choreographies of the game, the more detached it seemed from the necessary international task at hand.
And then there was Trotty. Poor old Albert had shot himself the previous week in his lodgings at Harlesden. He wasn’t a close friend but the Old Man had always enjoyed his company: he was a huge personality full of amusing stories, and Grace had always greatly admired him as a cricketer, too. He’d always be remembered for hitting the ball clean over the Lord’s Pavilion, something nobody else had emulated. His memories of Trotty were all infused with laughter. To think of him, alone in a room, cradling a pistol in his hands preparing to end his life served only to reinforce the gloom in Grace’s heart.
He sat alone on a bench in front of the pavilion watching the field change after the penultimate over. The umpires in their straw boaters and long white coats each took their measured steps between square leg and the wickets like two figures from a cuckoo clock. The white-clad fielders converged on the square and spread again, like a flower closing and opening towards the sun.
War never petered out like this. There was always a result and the entire nation needed to ensure that the outcome was the right one. It was that simple.
As the dead game went through the motions of its final over a cloud passed across the sun. The last ball was defended back to the bowler, the umpire called time and removed the bails, there was a pitter-patter of applause from the field and the ragged, sun-weary procession began to make its way towards the pavilion. There was a scraping of tin as someone began to remove the numbers from the scoreboard and drop them in an untidy pile.
The Old Man heaved himself up from his bench and took a few stiff steps across the boundary rope towards the gaggle of players. He shook hands with the batsmen, the umpires and every member of the opposing team and watched them go into the pavilion. He stood for a while, hands in trouser pockets, then began to walk out across the empty field, the bright green of the grass now showing a blueish sheen under the clouds. He reached the light strip of the pitch, naked without stumps at each end, the scratches and gouges from the day’s play still visible. He walked to the crease at one end and placed his feet as he would if he were taking guard, held an imaginary bat and settled into his stance. He looked down at his feet placed either side of the crease and looked up the field, but saw neither an umpire leaning over the wicket with a sweater draped over his arm nor a bowler at the end of his run pushing his hair back from his forehead ready to commence his run-up; there was just an empty expanse of field with trees in the distance.
Tuesday 25 August 1914
Even an hour’s putting practice couldn’t quell the restlessness. He’d hoped the concentration and relaxation of a session on the green in the back garden at Fairmount would settle hi
s mind but although he was sinking the ball nearly every time his mind remained curiously agitated. He was anxious about Edgar, ‘the Commander’ as he proudly called him, somewhere out on the North Sea with his ship. Charles was not in such immediate danger at Sheerness, and his regular visits – the sound of his motorcycle coming up the drive always gladdened his heart – reassured both him and Agnes on that front, but Grace remained perplexed by the war situation. For the first time in his life cricket wasn’t the most important thing in the world. The war dominated his thoughts and he’d begun reading the newspaper reports closely every morning. The British Expeditionary Force was engaged at Mons and it sounded like a hell of a battle. It seemed as if they were holding their line and arresting the German sweep across Belgium into France, but he’d heard talk of more than two thousand British Expeditionary Force casualties already and couldn’t bear it. All he could think of were Charles and the Commander, of how men just like them were falling in droves. He’d already buried two of his children; he couldn’t countenance having to bury another.
And all the while cricket limped on. He’d been at Lord’s a couple of weeks earlier for Hobbs’s benefit. The Oval had been requisitioned as a stores depot so the match had been moved to St John’s Wood and there was barely a crowd. Yet a week earlier, just before war was declared, 15,000 had turned out on the Bank Holiday Monday to see the same player score 226. The same day A.H. Hornby had been called away to the War Office as he was taking the field for Lancashire against Yorkshire at Old Trafford. While bowling at Trent Bridge, Nottinghamshire’s Basil Melle had received a telegram summoning him to Oxford to join the University’s regiment of the King’s Colonial Corps.
Gilbert: The Last Years of WG Grace Page 10
