Surrey v Somerset
1925-08-17
On Monday 17 August 1925 at Taunton, the 42-year-old Jack Hobbs cut a Jim Bridges short ball for four to reach 101 — his 126th first-class century, equalling W.G. Grace's career record. The next morning he made another, 101 not out, and the 'Master' had passed the figure that had defined English batting since 1895.
England
1915-10-23
William Gilbert Grace, the Victorian giant who had effectively invented modern batsmanship and dominated English cricket for forty years, died at his home in Mottingham on 23 October 1915. He was 67. The Zeppelin raids over London in his final weeks were said by family to have agitated him beyond endurance.
England
1914-08-27
On 27 August 1914, four weeks into the war, W.G. Grace published an open letter in The Sportsman urging that first-class cricket be suspended. The letter — 'I think the time has arrived when the county cricket season should be closed' — effectively ended the 1914 season early and shamed any club still playing into stopping.
Gentlemen of England, Surrey
1908-04-22
William Gilbert Grace played his last first-class match between 20 and 22 April 1908, opening the innings for the Gentlemen of England against Surrey at The Oval. Aged a few months short of 60, Grace made 15 in the first innings and 25 in the second. It was his 870th first-class appearance, ending a career that began in 1865.
Nottinghamshire, England
1903-05-19
Arthur Shrewsbury, the Nottinghamshire opener whom W.G. Grace called the only contemporary he would 'rather have in my side', shot himself at his sister's home in Gedling on 19 May 1903 aged 47. Convinced he was incurably ill — though doctors had repeatedly told him otherwise — he had bought a revolver in mid-April and shot himself first in the chest, then in the head when the first wound proved non-fatal. The Notts side at Hove abandoned their match the next morning.
London County, English first-class counties
1900-04-15
In 1900 W.G. Grace, then 51, took up an offer from the Crystal Palace Company to run a first-class cricket club at Sydenham. London County CC played first-class matches from 1900 to 1904 (their friendly status meant they could not enter the County Championship), then declined as Grace aged. The whole venture closed in 1908 — the same year Grace played his last first-class match.
England, Australia
1899-06-01
Wilfred Rhodes made his Test debut at Trent Bridge in June 1899 — the same match that proved to be W.G. Grace's last Test. Rhodes' Test career would span 30 years 313 days, the longest in history; he would also be the oldest Test player ever (52 years 165 days). Through the 1900s he was first England's slow left-arm spinner and then, by 1909, an opening batsman.
England v Australia
1899-06-01
On 1-3 June 1899, in the first Test ever played at Trent Bridge, the 50-year-old W.G. Grace captained England against Australia. He made 28 and 1, dropped catches at point, and was barracked by the Nottingham crowd over his fielding. Three days after the match he resigned the captaincy and his place. The same Test marked the debuts of Wilfred Rhodes (21) and Victor Trumper (21) — Rhodes would play with Bradman in his last Test; Trumper would become Australia's first cricketing icon.
England v Australia
1899-06-01
On 1 June 1899, the 21-year-old Yorkshire left-arm spinner Wilfred Rhodes opened England's bowling against Australia at Trent Bridge and took 4 for 58 in 35.1 overs on debut. The same Test marked W.G. Grace's last appearance. Rhodes would play another 57 Tests across the next 31 years, finishing with the longest Test career in cricket history — the only man to play with both W.G. Grace and Don Bradman.
Essex, Gloucestershire
1898-07-01
Charles Jesse Kortright of Essex was generally considered the fastest bowler of the Victorian era — quicker, contemporaries said, than Tom Richardson or Arthur Mold. He never played a Test, but his 1898 confrontation with W.G. Grace at Leyton produced one of cricket's most-quoted exchanges: when Grace declined to walk despite being plumb out, Kortright eventually uprooted two stumps and remarked, 'Surely you're not going, Doc? There's still one stump standing.'
Gentlemen v Players
1898-07-18
MCC arranged the 1898 Gentlemen v Players match at Lord's to begin on 18 July — the 50th birthday of W.G. Grace, who captained the Gentlemen side. Grace, lame and with an injured hand, made 43 and 31 not out in a drawn match. The fixture was treated as a national event: the King (then Prince of Wales) attended, the press described it as a tribute to 'the most celebrated Englishman of his age', and four days later Grace went to Trent Bridge and made 168 against Notts, his highest score of the summer.
Gloucestershire v Somerset
1895-05-17
On 17 May 1895, in his 47th year, W.G. Grace became the first cricketer to score 100 first-class hundreds, raising the milestone in a Championship match against Somerset at Bristol. He carried on to 288 — his ninth-highest career score — and when he reached 200 the home crowd brought champagne onto the field for him to toast himself at the wicket. It was the centrepiece of an 'Indian Summer' that produced 1,016 runs in May alone.
Gloucestershire v Sussex/Somerset/Yorkshire/Middlesex/Kent
1895-05-30
Grace started his 1895 season on 9 May and finished it on 30 May with 1,016 first-class runs at an average over 100. Scores of 13, 103, 18, 25, 288, 52, 257, 73*, 18 and 169 made him the first player to score 1,000 first-class runs in May, a Victorian benchmark only matched twice since — by Wally Hammond in 1927 and Charlie Hallows in 1928. He was 46 going on 47.
England v Australia
1891-12-15
When the Earl of Sheffield financed an English tour of Australia in 1891-92 with WG Grace as captain, he ended the trip by donating £150 to the New South Wales Cricket Association to fund a perpetual trophy for inter-colonial cricket. The result: the Sheffield Shield, contested between NSW, Victoria and South Australia from 1892-93 onwards, and the foundational competition of Australian first-class cricket.
England (Notts)
1886-08-10
When asked who he would prefer as his batting partner, WG Grace replied simply, 'Give me Arthur' — meaning Arthur Shrewsbury of Nottinghamshire. Shrewsbury was the best professional batsman of the 1880s, the leader of the 1881 Notts strike, the co-organiser of three private tours of Australia, and Wisden Cricketer of the Year in the inaugural 1890 list (the second list, for batsmen). He killed himself in 1903 aged 47, after years of paranoid hypochondria.
England v Australia
1882-08-29
On the second morning of the 1882 Oval Test, with Australia's score at 114 in their second innings, young Sammy Jones wandered out of his crease to do some gardening — and WG Grace, ball in hand at point, threw down the stumps. Spofforth, watching from the pavilion, called Grace 'a bloody cheat' and reportedly stormed into the England dressing room with the line, 'this will lose you the match.' Two hours later he had taken 7 for 44 and Australia had won by 7 runs.
England vs Australia
1880-09-06
George Frederick Grace, the youngest of the three Grace brothers, played his only Test at the Oval in September 1880 — the first Test ever played in England. He scored 0 and 0 with the bat but took a famous running catch to dismiss George Bonnor. Two weeks later, on 22 September 1880, Fred Grace died of pneumonia, aged 29.
England v Australia
1880-09-06
On 6 September 1880, in the very first Test match played in England, the 32-year-old WG Grace opened the innings with his elder brother EM and went on to score 152 — the first Test century by an England batsman, on debut and on home soil. England won by five wickets. The Grace family's three brothers (WG, EM and GF) all played, the only time three brothers have appeared together in a Test match.
Amateurs v Professionals
1880-07-05
Through the 1880s, English cricket maintained the strict separation of Gentlemen (amateurs, with initials before the surname) from Players (professionals, with initials after). The annual Gentlemen v Players match at Lord's drew vast crowds; behind it lay separate dressing rooms, separate gates, and the awkward fact that some 'amateurs' (notably WG Grace) earned more from cricket than any professional. The Notts strike of 1881 was the era's most public eruption of this contradiction.
Australia vs MCC
1878-05-27
On 27 May 1878 the touring Australians, on their first visit to England, bowled MCC out twice in a single day at Lord's. MCC made 33 and 19; Australia made 41 and 12 for 1 to win by 9 wickets. Fred Spofforth took 6/4 (including a hat-trick) and 4/16; Harry Boyle 3/14 and 6/3. W.G. Grace was clean-bowled by Spofforth for 4. The match made Australian cricket's reputation in a single afternoon.
MCC vs Australia
1878-05-27
W.G. Grace, the most famous batsman in the world, was clean-bowled by Fred Spofforth for 4 at Lord's on 27 May 1878. The dismissal — among the most famous of the 19th century — fixed Spofforth's reputation and shocked the English cricket establishment, which had assumed the touring Australians would be no match for MCC's strongest XI.
Gloucestershire / MCC / Gentlemen / South
1873-08-31
In 1873 W.G. Grace became the first cricketer to score 1,000 first-class runs and take 100 first-class wickets in the same English season. He repeated the feat seven more times before 1886. The 'Grace double' set the bar for the all-rounder's season for the next century.
England (W.G. Grace's XI) in Australia
1873-10-01
Two weeks after marrying Agnes Day in October 1873, W.G. Grace took her on his honeymoon by sailing to Australia at the head of a private cricket tour. He was paid £1,500 — the equivalent of well over £100,000 today — for what was effectively a privately organised England side. The tour played 15 matches across Australia and laid the groundwork for the Test era that followed three years later.
South v North (representative match)
1871-08-01
W.G. Grace's 268 for South against North at The Oval in August 1871 was the highest score of his career to that point and the centrepiece of an extraordinary season in which he became the first cricketer to pass 2,000 first-class runs in a summer. He averaged 78.25 — twice anyone else — and made ten of the 17 first-class centuries scored in England that year.
Multiple
1869-09-01
In 1869, his fifth full season of first-class cricket and the year he turned 21, W.G. Grace produced batting figures that ended any debate about the leading cricketer in England. He scored 1,320 first-class runs at an average of 57.3 — at a time when totals over 200 were rare and averages over 40 were almost unknown — and turned the Gentlemen vs Players fixture, which the Players had usually dominated, into a one-man Gentlemen victory.
England vs Surrey
1866-07-31
Two weeks after his eighteenth birthday, W.G. Grace scored 224 not out for England against Surrey at the Oval — his maiden first-class century, his first double-hundred, and the innings that, in Harry Altham's phrase, made him 'thenceforward the biggest name in cricket'. On the second afternoon his captain V.E. Walker let him slip away to Crystal Palace to win the National Olympian Association 440 yards hurdles race; he then returned to bat on.
Gentlemen of the South vs Players of the South
1865-06-22
On 22 June 1865, sixteen days short of his seventeenth birthday, William Gilbert Grace played his first first-class match. Picked by the Gentlemen of the South against the Players of the South at the Oval mainly for his bowling, he and I.D. Walker bowled unchanged through both Players innings. Grace took 13 wickets in the match. Although the Players won by 118 runs, the cricket world had its first sight of the man who would dominate the sport for the next thirty years.