Lives in Cricket No 23 - Brief Candles

72 Chapter Five In the Wickets An Irish Airman Robert Gregory is one of only half a dozen bowlers to take eight wickets in an innings in his one and only first-class match. But it is not this that makes him almost certainly the most widely-known of the cricketers covered in this volume; we’ll come to that in a while. Brief biographies of him appear in numerous sources, including the Dictionary of Irish Biography (DIB) , to which I would refer the reader who is looking for a short but still comprehensive life-history of the man. 113 Here I must concentrate only on the principal features of his life, and – if it is not already regarded as one of those features – on his cricket. With that in mind, from some of the many sources dealing with Gregory 114 it appears that the main features of his eventful life were these: l he was born on 20 May 1881 at the family home at Coole Park, near Gort in County Galway l he was a fine all-round sportsman, whose record includes winning a Blue for boxing and winning the French amateur boxing championship l he was a leg-spinner who played one first-class match, for Ireland against Scotland in 1912, in which he took eight wickets in Scotland’s first innings l he played non-first-class cricket with W.G.Grace l he was an outstanding artist and stage-designer, with strong links to the Abbey Theatre in Dublin l he married a fellow artist in 1906, and they had three children l in the First World War he became a pilot with the Royal Flying Corps, recording 19 ‘kills’ including shooting down the ‘Red Baron’ l he was shot down and killed in action over Italy on 23 January 1918 l he was the subject of, or inspiration for, four post-war poems by W.B.Yeats. Each of these statements is well-sourced, usually in more than one source. Which makes it all the more remarkable to discover that almost every one of them is to one degree or another wrong, or at best unverifiable. Let’s try and build up an accurate picture of Gregory by examining them one by one. 113 Dictionary of Irish Biography , ed. James McGuire and James Quinn (Royal Irish Academy/ Cambridge University Press, 2009) 114 Gregory’s name is cited in numerous books and articles. Those that have been of most help in preparing this chapter are identified in footnotes or listed in the Bibliography.