London Calling. London Walks connecting.
This is London. This is London Walks.
Streets ahead. Story time. History time.
And sometimes you go looking for London history. And sometimes London history is lying there waiting for you.
That happened to me yesterday.
I was on Walk 12 of the Ultimate London Walk. The London Camino.
Fourteen walks. Forty-two miles. All the way across London. From the Hertfordshire border in the north to the Surrey Downs in the south.
And yesterday we were walking from Anerley to South Norwood.
We went through Beckenham Cemetery. The cemetery was formerly known as Elmers End Cemetery, which is why you’ll sometimes find W. G. Grace described as being buried at Elmers End.
And there he was.
W. G. Grace.
Now, confession time.
I’m an American.
Cricket is not exactly mother’s milk to me.
I understand the broad principles. Somebody throws the ball. Except he doesn’t throw it, he bowls it. Somebody else hits it. Except he doesn’t have to run when he hits it. There are wickets. There are overs. There are silly mid-offs.
And at about that point I start looking for a baseball game.
But even I know W. G. Grace.
That tells you something.
That huge beard. That extraordinary bulk. That unmistakable Victorian face.
The initials themselves are enough.
W. G.
You don’t even need the Grace.
He was the great sporting celebrity of Victorian Britain. He was a legend in his own lifetime. His appearance was as recognisable as that of almost anybody in Britain.
For an American audience, I suppose the shorthand would be:
W. G. Grace was cricket’s Babe Ruth.
Except he arrived half a century earlier.
And what a cricketer.
He made his debut in men’s cricket the day after his ninth birthday.
Nine!
By his teens he was playing at Lord’s and the Oval.
At 18 he made 224 not out at the Oval, then the highest score ever made there. One contemporary publication called him “the most wonderful cricketer that ever held a bat.”
And he didn’t just bat.
He bowled.
Boy, did he bowl.
The traditional first-class figures give him 54,896 runs and 2,876 wickets.
And in 1895, when he was 47-years-old, he had one of the most extraordinary seasons of his life.
He became the first man to score a hundred first-class centuries.
The Pall Mall Gazette threw up its hands and said, “He has drained the language of eulogy.”
Wonderful line.
There was simply nothing left to say about him.
And he was a character.
Oh, was he a character.
He could be argumentative. Autocratic. He intimidated opponents. He intimidated umpires. He had a certain reluctance to accept that being given out necessarily meant he should actually go out.
One Australian cricketer called him an “artful old toad.”
I like him already.
And then there’s this wonderful detail.
The great W. G. Grace. The most famous cricketer in the world. This enormous, bearded, Falstaffian figure.
And apparently he had a high, piping voice.
With a mild West Country burr.
You couldn’t make him up.
But cricket wasn’t the whole man.
Those letters after his name mattered too.
Doctor Grace.
He studied medicine, eventually qualified at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, and for twenty years combined cricket with being a doctor, including work for the Bristol Poor Law Union and a largely working-class private practice. His generosity with his patients was legendary. A friend remembered him as “ever ready to lend a helping hand.”
So that’s the man whose grave Charlie took us to yesterday.
The Champion.
The Old Man.
W. G.
The public figure.
And there’s a small stone at the front of the grave which gives you exactly that man.
W. G. GRACE.
DOCTOR AND CRICKETER.
1848–1915.
Almost like a logo.
That’s the man history remembers.
But then I walked closer.
And I read the big backing stone.
And everything changed.
Because above W. G. Grace’s name is another name.
William Gilbert Grace.
His eldest son.
Born July 6th, 1874.
Died March 2nd, 1905.
Thirty years old.
Thirty.
He’d been a cricketer as well. A Cambridge Blue. Played a little for Gloucestershire. But, as one biographer rather brutally put it, he “never remotely matched” his father’s talents.
Imagine carrying that name.
William Gilbert Grace.
And having that William Gilbert Grace for your father.
But he died at 30.
And then you look a little higher up on the same monument.
And there’s another name.
Bessie.
And the wording changes.
“In tender memory of Bessie.”
“The dearly loved and only daughter of William Gilbert and Agnes Nicholls Grace.”
Born May 28th, 1878.
Died February 6th, 1899.
Twenty years old.
Twenty.
And now the great beard disappears.
The runs disappear.
The wickets disappear.
The crowds disappear.
The records disappear.
And you’re looking at a father.
A father who buried his only daughter when she was 20.
And six years later buried his eldest son when he was 30.
There’s something else I subsequently discovered that makes Bessie’s death still more important.
One biographical account says explicitly that Grace moved to London in 1898 because of the death of his daughter Bessie, together with changes to his medical work and the winding up of his practice.
There’s a puzzle there because the gravestone gives Bessie’s death as February 1899. So I don’t want to tidy that discrepancy away. One of those dates or formulations needs further investigation.
But there’s no ambiguity about the larger fact.
Bessie’s death changed his life.
And then William died.
And W. G. went on.
He played cricket almost to the end.
His last game was in July 1914.
He was 66 years old.
He scored an unbeaten 60.
Ten days later, the First World War began.
Grace urged cricketers to go and serve their country.
And just over a year later, on October 23rd, 1915, W. G. Grace died after a stroke at his home in Mottingham.
He was 67.
He was buried three days later in the cemetery where we found him yesterday.
And here’s something poignant.
His funeral was not the great national gathering of cricketers you might expect.
Many of the men who would have been there…
were at war.
They had done what W. G. Grace had urged them to do.
And now, Word of the Day.
Predecease.
Not the most beautiful word in the English language.
In fact, it’s got the whiff of solicitors’ offices and wills about it.
But it’s exactly the word for this story.
To predecease somebody is to die before them.
Pre, before.
Decease, death.
And we normally encounter the word coldly.
“The beneficiary predeceased the testator.”
Legal language.
Administrative language.
But stand in front of that grave and suddenly there’s nothing administrative about it.
Two of W. G. Grace’s children predeceased him.
Bessie by sixteen years.
William by ten.
And I think that’s why that grave got to me.
Because history does this.
It turns people into one thing.
Churchill becomes the war.
Dickens becomes the novels.
Nelson becomes Trafalgar.
W. G. Grace becomes cricket.
54,896 runs.
2,876 wickets.
The beard.
The Champion.
And then you walk into a cemetery on a September afternoon.
You get close enough to read the small print.
And history gives you the person back.
Yesterday I thought I knew who was buried there.
W. G. Grace. Great cricketer. Victorian legend. Cricket’s Babe Ruth.
Then I read the stone.
And met a father.
London Calling. London Walks connecting.
This is London. This is London Walks.
Twelve down. Not out. Two to go.
See you tomorrow.