W. G. Grace

He just is always that, and that's maybe his defining characteristic as a human being, but...

You know, he he wrote once about W.G. Grace, the great cricket player, that he thought he was a grown up schoolboy.

And I think in a lot of ways that's true of Bernardo.

You know, he has his schoolboy years at Eaton, I think, are formative in a way for him that maybe they aren't for every other person.

If you can actually Google him while you're on, if you can take your eyes away from the football there for one second.

W.G. Grace.

WG Grace.

Now, he is arguably one of the goats of cricket.

A forceful stroke maker, particularly strong on the leg side, Stoddart was also a useful first-change bowler and brilliant fielder.

But it was his opening bat, partnering the great WG Grace, that he forced his way into the England side in the early 1890s.

He played 16 Test matches, scoring almost 1,000 runs, and toured Australia four times, going out as captain in the 1894-95 series, which England won rather against the odds.

A later tour in 1897 proved a disaster.

...was a keeper at one point domestically, but didn't keep in tests.

WG Grace and Steve Smith.

Mm.

That's the top 10, and those are the only players who've got a 0.9 or higher ratio in test cricket, which I find fascinating.

From the beginning of his journalism career, for instance, Bernard was engaged in writing children's books, and he wrote more than a half a dozen of them in all, some in verse and some in prose, the vast majority of them illustrated by his wife Eleanor, who was an artist of genuine consequence.

And he also wrote two books about British railways, biographies of his favorite author Charles Dickens and his favorite cricketer William Gilbert Grace.

But the book I've been spending the most time on this month is maybe Bernardo's least known work outside of golf, and it's called John Gully and His Times.

And it's a really thoroughly researched life of one of England's more exceptional bare-knuckle boxing champions.

...

the, uh, you know, the famous old line about W.G. Grace, the cricketer, when he was given out by an umpire, and he said to the umpire, "They didn't come here to see me, umpire.

They didn't come here to see you umpire.

They came here-

Um, I think there was one or two more sciencey-led or technic- technically correct maybe led, or however you wanna put it, towards the start.

So I always knew I wanted to start the book with WG Grace 'cause I thought that was a really important one.

I got one really good review from someone, uh, who like did not get that start at all and like it was a terrible start.

And I was like, but it actually, it, it was-- I was act- I was told largely it was one of the reasons I was nominated for the Sports Book Award as well.

But so, you know, when you take a leap like that, some people love it, some people hate it, which is kinda how my career generally goes with these things.

But I really wanted a WG Grace book as a section to start so you understood the angle I was coming from as a writer.

And also that it would be, you know, at times, uh, not particularly just about cricket, it would be, you know, uh, more about society and, um, changes and evolution and everything else.

And so that kind of led into a couple of chapters that are probably more like that.

It's not my world.

W.G. Grace is in Bromley.

Fair enough.

He's a big cricketer.