The Greatest of Gentlemen: W. G. Grace Bows Out

It was the morning of 3 June 1899, and W. G. Grace had come to his decision. As the sun beat down on the wicket at Trent Bridge, he resolved to make the match his final bow. At 51 years of age, carrying rather a lot more weight than he once had, Grace had lost much of his agility and sharpness in the field. Struggling to get to the clever drives of Australia's batsmen, huffing and puffing beneath his greying, bushy beard, the greatest of gentlemen cricketers took stock of the situation, and realised the game was up.

It was the third day of the First Test against Australia, and England looked laboured. Usually imperious at the stumps, Grace had recorded a modest 28 runs in his first innings and a paltry one run in his second. Alongside a lacklustre showing from the middle order, his slump had left the hosts needing a whopping score to avoid defeat to the touring Aussies. England looked likely to succumb but, against the odds, managed to eke out a draw with their old foes.

Nonetheless, Grace held himself responsible for the performance. In the days afterwards, he brooded. On the morning of his meeting with the team selectors, he steeled himself. He asked the selectors whether they thought fellow batsman Archie MacLaren should play in the Second Test. When they replied in the affirmative, he promptly yielded both his place and his captaincy to his teammate, and retired from Test cricket on the spot.

This gesture epitomised W. G. Grace. He was a gentleman in the truest sense of the word, but also a wilful personality and an unpredictable character. Born in 1848 to a doctoring family just outside Bristol, he came from a well-to-do background and was, in his own words, brought up "in an atmosphere of cricket." He was an upper-middle class country boy; a youngster with strong prospects in the preferential world of Victorian Britain. He spent his days roaming the fields, scrumping and living the carefree life of a lad who – unlike many of his poorer contemporaries – was not required to work. He soon shot up to the prodigious height of 6 ft 2, and exhausted countless hours honing his batting stance on the local wicket.

Though he was never the brightest lad in the parish, his burgeoning skill as a batsman saw him receive tacit offers from both Oxford and Cambridge once he reached young adulthood. Instead, on his father's encouragement, he enrolled at Bristol Medical School at the age of 20 and trained to become a doctor. Thanks to his cricketing commitments, he would not complete his qualifications until he was 31. In the meantime, he made a name for himself as one of the greatest cricketers in the world.

Grace's first-class career began in 1865, when he started playing for the All-England team, a non-international England side which would play high-profile domestic fixtures. He soon started playing for the Marylebone Cricket Club, as well as his home county of Gloucestershire. Cricket was undergoing something of a revolution at the time, with underarm and roundarm bowling being gradually replaced with the overarm technique we know today. Grace found himself playing a protean, ever-changing sport, but nevertheless managed to make an indelible mark on cricket's collective consciousness.

Though he was an excellent all-rounder, it was Grace's batting that captured the contemporary imagination. In July 1866, not long after his 18th birthday, he hit 224 not out for All-England against Surrey at The Oval. It was his first ever senior century, and earned him headlines up and down the country. Crowds flocked to watch him play, and were rarely disappointed with what they saw.

As Grace racked up the centuries, he started to gain the status of a national celebrity. His hirsute face and towering height made him instantly identifiable, and he soon found his own stern visage staring out at him from newspapers wherever he went. In 1868, he hit two centuries over the course of one match, a feat that had only been achieved once before. From this point onward, spectators seemed to consider him a cricketing deity made flesh, and he only encouraged them with his gargantuan personality on and off the field.

In the face of his enormous talent, opponents and teammates alike were forced to concede Grace's superiority. After a month in which he had scored 100 or more on four occasions, his eventual haul of 122 in a match between the North of England and the South led West Yorkshire fast bowler Tom Emmett to remark: "He ought to be made to play with a littler bat." Though his performances over the course of 1870 were fantastic, 1871 was something else. In all first-class cricket that year, a total of 17 centuries were scored. Grace had provided 10 of them, averaging 78.25 runs an innings. The next best average was 39.57.

In that same incredible year, Grace racked up a total of 2,739 runs. It was the first time a cricketer had scored more than 2,000 runs in a season, with his closest challenger hitting a total of 1,068. It's hard to put into words just how miraculous this feat was at the time, but it made Grace a sporting demigod comparable to the most famous professionals of the modern day. He continued to deliver well over 1,000 runs a season on a consistent basis over the next ten years, while also regularly taking 100 wickets or more.

And yet, W. G. Grace was not a professional. He was a proud amateur, and would remain so until his retirement from all forms of the sport.

From his earliest days playing first-class cricket, Grace turned out for the Gentlemen. In the nineteenth century, cricketers were divided into amateurs (represented by the Gentlemen) and professionals, who would come to be represented by a team known as the Players. The amateur game was a product of the English aristocracy, and flourished in the great public schools and universities of the day. Accordingly, amateur players tended to be either upper or upper-middle class and – rather than take payment for their appearances – claimed expenses. Meanwhile, professional players were generally working class, and were paid a wage.

Coming from a family line of doctors, Grace was always going to be an amateur. Cricket at the time reflected the intractable class structure of Victorian society, and so a player's path was set from the start. The system was not without controversy, since gentlemen players – Grace included – often received "expenses" that vastly outstripped the wages of their professional counterparts. W. G. and his brother E. M. Grace were forced to face an expenses inquiry at one point, so contentious was the issue. Nonetheless, Grace's achievements were those of an amateur cricketer, and not those of a man who relied upon the game for his livelihood.

As such, Grace's own motivations remain intensely personal. Though he was, without doubt, generously remunerated for his performances, money was not the incentive behind his success. He was a doctor, a landowner and a family man, and had a life beyond cricket. He could not devote his life to training in the way a modern sportsman can and, first and foremost, he played cricket for the love of the game.

In the context of his amateurism, his contribution to the sport seems all the more phenomenal. As the greatest of gentlemen, he did more to shape the future of the game than almost anyone else. Though several notable contemporaries came from the amateur tradition, professional cricket had been on the rise long before Grace took to the crease. Prior to his arrival on the scene, matches between the Gentlemen and the Players almost always ended in defeat for the former, with the latter boasting the majority of household names.

Grace almost single-handedly revived the Gentlemen over the course of the 1870s, batting them to victory on numerous occasions. However, it was his contribution to the England team that really influenced the national psyche. With the concept of the international game still young when Grace started playing, he became synonymous with English Test cricket. Grace made his debut in 1880 – only three years after the first ever official Test between England and Australia – and was an ever-present over the course of the next two decades.

He played 22 Tests against Australia, scoring several magnificent centuries and ending up on the winning side 13 times. England were the undisputed masters of international cricket, and W. G. Grace was their talisman. However, he was also the main protagonist in the infamous 1882 Test at the Oval, when Australia recorded their first ever win on English soil. After much gamesmanship from Grace, Aussie fast bowler Fred Spofforth was so incensed that he went on to take four wickets for two runs. The visitors claimed victory, and the legend of the Ashes was born.

Even in defeat, Grace was seminal. Fiercely competitive, tenacious in an argument and yet surprisingly good humoured for a man of such severe countenance, his opponents learned as much from his approach to the game as his teammates.

If he helped to shape the identity of the England cricket team, Grace also inspired a wave of national pride in cricket. The sport's popularity rocketed, and much of that was down to his influence. He did all this while maintaining his doctor's practise in Bristol and, by all reports, doing great credit to the medical profession. He might have claimed significant expenses from cricket, but he had a reputation for "forgetting" to charge his poorer patients and tacitly providing free medical care to those in the local workhouse. He was, all in all, a decent and much-respected man.

A silent film shows Grace batting at the practise nets in 1899, the year of his retirement from Test cricket

By the time that age finally caught up with him, Grace had firmly secured his place in cricketing folklore both for his immense talent and his nuanced character. His fondness for food and wine might have cost him his athleticism, but his contribution to the sport would never be forgotten. As a proud amateur, he had changed the game irreversibly. He bowed out in suitably gentlemanly fashion, safe in the knowledge that he was one of the greatest sportsmen the country had ever known.

@W_F_Magee