Lives in Cricket No 23 - Brief Candles

77 W.G.Grace Both of the non-cricket brief biographies of Gregory include references to W.G. That compiled by Colin Smythe, see footnote 129, expressly states that Gregory ‘played with the legendary W.G.Grace’; this reference is repeated in a letter in Autumn 1989 from Mike Spurrier in The Cricket Statistician . The monograph by Roy Clements is however a little more cautious. 121 It includes a photograph which is claimed to show ‘the teams of a cricket match at Coole’, with both Gregory and W.G. included. But there are more than 22 people in the photograph, and there is no specific statement that W.G. played in the match concerned; indeed, Roy Clements specifically tells us that ‘it is said that [W.G.] came [to Coole] more for the out-of season shooting than for the cricket’. The definitive source on W.G.’s cricket career, J.R.Webber’s The Chronicle of WG , 122 makes no reference to the great man playing any matches at Coole Park, while Gregory did not play in any of the dozen or so matches elsewhere in Ireland in which W.G. definitely did appear. (The relevant scorecards are all in CricketArchive.) So unless Webber has missed any of W.G.’s matches in Ireland, Grace and Gregory never played together in that country. The only other possibility of them playing together would have been for London County, during that side’s brief burst of life in the early 1900s. Not in a first-class match, of course: although London County played 64 such matches between 1900 and 1904, W.R.Gregory was never in one of their sides in these games. But the club also played a full programme of minor matches, mostly against South London club sides, in several of which W.G. played. So, can we establish if Gregory ever played in any of these matches with W.G.? Yes we can, and he didn’t. The Chronicle of WG doesn’t give full scorecards of WG’s minor matches, so these have to be tracked down in other sources. 123 Having done so, I can say with certainty that he and Gregory never played in the same London County side. Gregory played only twice in minor matches for London County, both in 1904; these were on 8 June away against Bromley, scoring 2 and taking two for 64, and on 18 June in a home match at Crystal Palace against Guy’s Hospital, scoring 40 at No.10 adding 69 for the ninth wicket in less than half an hour with W.M.Banbury, and taking four for 42. Both were, in effect, second eleven matches for the club, and W.G. played in neither of them. At the time of the first match, the ‘first eleven’ was playing a first-class match against Leicestershire, and at the time of the second, they were playing a fixture against Spencer; W.G. played in both these matches. The biggest name that Gregory played alongside in either game was Billy Murdoch, who captained the side against Guy’s Hospital. Otherwise he had just two team-mates in each match who were first-class cricketers; the four players concerned accumulated only 21 first-class appearances between them. 121 Roy Clements: Batsman pass by , Dari Press, 1995 122 J.R.Webber, The Chronicle of W.G. , ACS, 1998 123 I am grateful to Joe Webber for pointing me at the best sources for the period in which I am interested. In the Wickets