W.G. Grace And Me: The Last Days of The Champion

Everybody knows W.G. Grace. People with no interest in cricket know W.G. Grace. There can be no other sportsperson of any generation as instantly recognisable as the good Doctor – that giant, rotund frame and one of the greatest beards of all time in any field of achievement.

W.G. spent the last five years of his life in a quiet suburb of south-east London. In 1909, when in his early sixties, he'd moved to a large house called Fairmount which was – and is - just across the road from where I went to school. I used to walk past the austere frontage of the building on my way there and on my way home: it was an old people’s home then and twice a day I’d make a point of looking at the blue circular plaque above the porch and think about how lucky I was to pass so close to cricketing immortality.

Except W.G. wasn’t immortal. His achievements might be, his legend certainly is, but by the time he arrived in south-east London that giant frame was in a slow, terminal decline. The famous beard was grey, his features heavy. There was a sadness in his eyes; eyes that had been renowned for their twinkling mischief. In his time at the house he lost his beloved elder brother, E.M. Grace and then his close friend and fellow legendary cricketer Albert Trott to suicide. The Great War troubled him: two of his sons were in the forces and the Zeppelins heading for bombing raids at Woolwich Arsenal passed over his house, a terrifying experience for a population who’d never faced a direct threat from the air before.

With the school so close at hand and with it having a cricket field it’s no surprise that W.G. played there in his dotage. I played my first games of cricket on that same school pitch. I wasn’t very good, but in those early days of trying to keep my bat straight, tongue sticking out of the side of my mouth in concentration, freezing afternoons around the slip cradle and trying desperately to pitch it up, I developed a love for the game that has never dimmed. I made my very first runs and took my first wickets on that pitch. I suffered my first duck on that pitch. I’d bat low down the order for the school and scratch around for the odd run and streaky four off the edge.

One day stands out though; the day I was clapped off the field for the first time. It was after a match-saving sixteen not out on the very same pitch Grace had batted on more than seventy years earlier.

I was about twelve. At the time it was the best feeling of my life and I didn’t want that walk to end. I’d not made a hundred or even fifty, I’d scuffed around making sixteen, but I’d helped to save the game and it felt brilliant. I felt like a cricketer, at last.

The greatest player of all time had walked off the same pitch across the same ground in the golden twilight of the ultimate cricket story. I was far from being even the greatest cricketer on the field that day, but my feet fell in Grace’s footsteps back to the pavilion: where his cricket life had been coming to an end, mine was just beginning.

I’d never scale the same heights, nor even pull on to the approach roads to the foothills, as The Champion, but I like to think that for all his achievements over an unparalleled half century of cricket, his applause had still made him feel as good as mine did that day.

In the dark days of his final years he must have looked forward to those matches. His movements may have been slower, his reactions blunted since his heyday, the games on local fields for and against local clubs not quite as spectacular as test matches against Australia, but as soon as he stepped onto that cricket field the worries and heartbreak must have receded. He must have felt young again. He must have felt just like I did. Like a cricketer.

A little over a year after his last game on that field, his health having deteriorated after a stroke, W.G. died at Fairmount on 23 October 1915.

When I walked past his old house that evening dragging my cricket bag with me, the applause still echoing in my head, I had an extra spring in my sandalled step. I looked up at the blue plaque and nodded to it.

You know, cricketer to cricketer.