Lives in Cricket No 23 - Brief Candles

73 Birth William Robert Gregory was the only child of Sir William Gregory KCMG, sometime MP, member of the Privy Council of Ireland, and Governor of Ceylon, and Lady Augusta Gregory, a major figure in the Irish Literary Revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By birth Lady Gregory was a member of the cricket-loving Persse family, 115 and it is reported that she first met her husband at a cricket match. When they married in 1880, Sir William was 62 and Augusta 27; the DIB dismisses rumours that Robert was the outcome of a liaison between Lady Gregory and the local blacksmith. The family home was certainly at Coole Park, in the western Irish countryside. But though several sources say Robert was born there, they are wrong. The DIB gives his place of birth as London, as do Oxford University records, and his birth certificate shows this to be correct: his actual birthplace was the family’s central London residence at 3 St George’s Place. The property no longer exists, but was located on the south side of Knightsbridge, very close to Hyde Park Corner, approximately where 5 Knightsbridge now stands. But the birth certificate contains another surprise. Every single source that I have investigated gives Robert Gregory’s date of birth as 20 May 1881, and this was the date that he himself gave when entering Oxford University in 1899. But the birth certificate clearly and unequivocally gives his date of birth as 21 May 1881. The informant was Sir William, who ought to have known; though maybe he simply gave the wrong date to the registrar after over-celebrating the birth of his son and heir. But if birth certificates are regarded as the conclusive source on such matters, we must reassign Gregory to a new birthdate of 21 May, as well as to a new place of birth. This sporting life Gregory went up to Harrow School at Easter 1895, accompanied by a new cricket bat that his mother had bought for him. It seems he was not an overly industrious student; at Harrow and later at Oxford, the DIB describes him as ‘talented but lazy; his principal interests were in sport’. He was, it seems, a highly talented allround sportsman, who numbered boxing, riding, hunting and shooting among his interests as well as cricket; and he was successful at all of them. But it seems to have been cricket that predominated. The DIB tells that he once claimed that in a dream he 115 CricketArchive includes seven cricketers called ‘Persse’ in its database, including two who played for Irish sides in the 1860s and 1870s. In the Wickets Gregory’s birth certificate shows he was born in Central London on 21 May rather than in County Galway on 20 May.