Gilbert: The Last Years of WG Grace by Connelly Charlie

Author:Connelly, Charlie [Connelly, Charlie]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2015-10-08T04:00:00+00:00

Saturday 24 April 1909

Curiosity. That’s mainly what had compelled him to attend the 1909 Football Association Cup Final at the Crystal Palace. That and the fact his old local team Bristol City had reached the final for the first time in its history. The same was true of their opponents, Manchester United from the North-West. As the final was being played practically on his Sydenham doorstep, meaning he could be back home in front of the fire with a whisky and soda within 20 minutes of the final whistle, he was delighted to accept an invitation to attend as an honoured guest.

Grace may have been a cricket man, but he appreciated all sports. He still went out beagling with the Worcester Park hounds whenever he could and still thoroughly enjoyed crown green bowls, a more genteel version of the West Country skittles of his childhood. Indeed it was a sport at which he excelled to the extent of captaining England in its first bowls international in 1903, winning the first home international tournament (even if he did have to point out the quirk of the rules that gave the title to England rather than the much-fancied Scots and insist it was upheld). He liked nothing more than sending his wood thundering down the green to scatter his opponents’ far and wide, in spite of the frequent whispers about the tactical value of his unsubtle philosophy. The number of Scots in his ‘England’ team was also a subject of discussion, out of his earshot.

In addition he’d discovered the pleasures of curling while in Scotland for bowls and still played whenever he could find a game at an ice rink, usually at the Princes’ Rink in Kensington but sometimes travelling as far as Maidenhead.

He was a lusty wielder of a golf club, too. Again his style was straightforward: he loved to belt the ball down the fairway and, now he had a putting green in the back garden, the more intricate wiles of the game were opening up to him as well. And, of course, no sociable evening was complete without at least an hour or two around the billiard table.

It was generally as a participant that he enjoyed his sport: like most career sportsmen he was a reluctant, nay, terrible spectator, but the sense of occasion attracted him to the Cup Final as much as its locality. Association football was still a strange concept to him. He’d never played the game but had become increasingly aware of the sport’s growing popularity, particularly among the working classes. Often in his general practice days when he’d attend at the house of a poor family, on the occasions when cricket talk had been exhausted the man of the house would try to engage him about the current fortunes of Bristol City or Rovers and so he had always kept a cursory eye on their progress. With their Saturday afternoons free for leisure, the men would head in droves to Ashton Gate or Eastville, pay

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