Vol. 20 No. 16 · 20 August 1998
pages 16-17 | 2879 words
The Great Accumulator
John Sturrock
- W.G. Grace: A Life by Simon Rae
Faber, 548 pp, £20.00, July 1998, ISBN 0 571 17855 3
- W.G.'s Birthday Party by David Kynaston
Night Watchman, 154 pp, £13.00, May 1998, ISBN 0 9532360 0 5
As English cricket’s first, and permanent, icon, W.G. Grace was a pair of inseparable initials – two doors down from that other High Victorian celebrity, ‘W.E.’ – and a ruling presence on the field of play, the muscular and assertive embodiment of the game in the years of its benign colonisation of the nation’s summers. The physique that famously sustained him was in truth a luxury: Grace was stronger than there was any call for a cricketer to be, ready to go off when young to run hurdle races between innings, and still up to bowling 75 overs in the match at the age of 50 (he was captain, and didn’t think of taking himself off). To which enviable share of vitality he added a mastery of cricket’s as yet unfinished techniques such that he did the most of anyone to bring the English game out from obscurity in the Shires and into the profit and the coverage that follow from playing in the middle of town.
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Letters
Vol. 20 No. 18 · 17 September 1998
From Keith Flett
John Sturrock suggests that W.G. Grace had the most charismatic beard of the 19th century. Such revisionism in the pages of the LRB will not do. The honour surely goes to Karl Marx.
Keith Flett
London N17
From Richard Penney
Referring to the local teams of 22 players against which W.G. played in his early years, John Sturrock asks (LRB, 20 August): ‘did they all field?’ The recommendation shown here for the placement of 22 players appears in the ‘Hints for Players’ section of John Lillywhite’s Cricketer’s Companion for 1872. The title on this map does say enigmatically at the commencement of a match, a phrase not used in any of the other five field placements for elevens. Maybe some of the 22 used to drop out as the match progressed, back to the haymaking or whatever?
Richard Penney
Moreton-in-Marsh, Gloucestershire
Vol. 20 No. 19 · 1 October 1998
From Don Miller
I had wondered whether John Sturrock would reply to the (initial) nine irate, if not stupefied letter-writers appalled at his apparent defence of French ‘social science’. I now see that he did so quite promptly, with his appreciation (LRB, 20 August) of that most stout symbol of Britishness, W.G. Grace. Surely I am hardly the only reader to hear the editorial chuckle as that selection was put together – and so soon. Confound them. But, in his fetching review of the Grace biography, Sturrock unwittingly displays the difficulty of cross-cultural observation. He hesitates in suggesting an Australian fast bowler’s apology to Grace in 1896 after delivering a bumper was not necessarily sincere. An Australian, on the contrary, would instantly know, with a smile, what ‘Sorry, Doctor, she slipped’ meant: an apology that was in no way an apology.
Don Miller
Melbourne
