SJS
Hall of Fame Member
The Good Doctor
No Legend is made of nothing and the legend of WG Grace is the best story in cricket, the best story in sport, and, in its own uncomplicated way, the best story of nineteenth century England......
The story is illuminated by the bright light that plays around its principal character, so that in his day and for long afterwards his countrymen saw a picture of him which was clearer and vivider than that of any other public figure in England. No one but Queen Victoria herself, and perhaps Mr Gladstone, would have been more easily recognisable throughout the land...
Railway porters frankly abandoned their barrowloads of luggage to shake his hand and he never refused you his hand, howsoever grubby, if you were bold enough to ask....
CB Fry's headmaster at Repton was once mistaken for WG by a porter at Nottingham station. It was a proud moment in his modest life....
The legend fills in the background with strong brush strokes of its own. It recounts, with an appreciative smile, that on some county grounds you could see the notice :
'Admission threepence : if Dr WG plays, admission sixpence'
It states categorically and picturesquely, that he provided half the bricks in more than half the pavillions in England. It tells you how .... hundreds of hansom cabs would go rattling down St John's Wood Road when it was known that he was at the wicket; and when he celeberated his jubilee, a quarter century later, the crowds at Lord's were thicker than ever....
Great Western trains would humbly wait for him at Paddington Station, while he talked to a friend.....
Sometimes a legendary figure looms so large, that the man himself is lost. Already those who sayu that sort of a thing will be muttering about the WG myth, or even myths, thereby implying a) that WG never existed and b) that this was highly to his discredit....
The legend is so large that young people think of WG, if they think at all, as a figure, heroic but shadowy...who could not compete in cricket today...
He did not invent the game and, indeed, the heroes of Hambledon lived long before him. Giants like Alfred Mynn and Fuller Pilch had had their day by the time WG's had begun....
Because he was such a wonder, a nonesuch, a champion - The Champion - and because he was for them a jolly symbol of the sportsman, the countryman, of everything that went with the green turf and a kindly sun - the British gave him their hearts.
They even loved his lack of modesty which could say, " Yes, I think Arthur is the second best bat in the country".
He had a simplicity that was not to be pitied, a simplicity that every Englishman of his day admired and loved.
When the time came to find an inscription for the great memorial(to WG) gate at Lord's there was difficulty in choosing.
The poets sent in their verses and the scholars their Greek or Latin elegiacs but set against that jovial jove -like figure, all of them seemed woefully inadequate.
Suddenly the phrase came to Sir Stanley Jackson....
Not a question was raised, not a word was said against it, and so the gate bears the simple inscription that all cricket lovers know :
TO THE MEMORY OF
WILLIAM GILBERT GRACE
THE GREAT CRICKETER
WILLIAM GILBERT GRACE
THE GREAT CRICKETER
to be continued...
Last edited:
