When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle bowled WG Grace – and immortalised it in poetry

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 125 years ago to this week, dismissed Dr WG Grace. Most of us do not write a poem about the favourite wicket we have taken, but the inventor of Sherlock Holmes can be forgiven for doing so – especially because it has gone down in the records as a first-class wicket, the only one Doyle ever took.

Doyle was representing MCC, which he did in 10 first-class matches, against London County in the Crystal Palace Park. A promoter had signed up WG to start a first-class cricket team in south London: WG fell out with his native Gloucestershire, wanting to play for both sides, and opted for the big money.

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The standard was not very high – WG selected two of his sons for London County and they, poor things, only wilted in their father’s great shadow – but it was officially first-class nonetheless. And Doyle’s poem is valuable because in the course of it he gives the best idea or flavour of what it was like to bowl at Grace, “the Champion”, even when he was well past his prime. He was 52, in fact, but still churning out his 1000 first-class runs per season.

Doyle, the son of an alcoholic in Edinburgh, had started writing at an early age. At Stonyhurst College he had found further solace in playing cricket, as a careful batsman and medium-pacer. Now, in 1900, playing a few games for MCC, he is world-renowned as the creator of Sherlock Holmes: Doyle based him on one of the doctors who had taught him medicine in Edinburgh and probably named him after the Derbyshire bowler of the time, Shacklock (Mycroft was another Derbyshire bowler whose name came in handy for Sherlock’s elder brother).

Something the poem omits to mention is that when Doyle was brought on to bowl, during London County’s second innings, WG was 110 not out. He has been busy thumping some MCC groundstaff bowlers but that does not mean he wants to give his wicket away: WG was WG because he was gargantuan in his appetite for food, drink, money and runs.

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Only one brief piece of film footage of WG batting exists: in his dotage he plays six balls stiffly, his enormous bulk on his back foot, no sign of a high left elbow or driving off the front foot. I suppose that later luxuries were denied him in his formative youth: there were no flat tracks in the 1860s, no heavy rollers to make them flat. But KS Ranjitsinhji has told us that WG was the greatest batsman because he was the first to combine play on the back foot with play on the front foot. Everyone previously had done one or the other.

Sherlock Holmes was fairly astute at observation, we can safely say, and so is his creator when preparing to bowl at WG. Doyle makes us feel what it was like to bowl at him:

Before me he stands like a vision,
Bearded and burly and brown,
A smile of good humoured derision
As he waits for the first to come down.

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Doyle goes on to invoke ancient Greek heroes then homes in again on his subject:

With the beard of a Goth or a Vandal
His bat hanging ready and free,
His great hairy hands on the handle,
And his menacing eyes upon me.

Doyle’s first two deliveries are treated with “utter contempt” but WG does not score off them. His third ball is not only short but lands outside off-stump – “a gift or it looked it” and “His huge figure swooped as he hooked it”.

Doyle justifiably dwells on what happens next: WG has top-edged the ball so that it soars into the air, almost vertically. But the question remains of who is going to catch this skyer, and here some ambiguity enters.

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MCC have in their side William Storer, a fine wicketkeeper-batsman for Derbyshire who had played six Tests for England. Doyle calls him “wicket keep Storer” – but the bowling analyses for London County’s second innings show that Storer bowls eight overs. And he did bowl decent leg-breaks in addition to keeping wicket: he took over 200 wickets in first-class cricket. So I guess we have to accept that, having bowled a few leggies, Storer puts on his gloves and reverts to behind the stumps, in which position he catches the skyer safely.

It is good to know that when Grace started chuntering after getting out – “he rumbled and grumbled, scolding himself and not me” – he had accepted his fate. He did not tell the umpire that it was a no-ball, and that he was actually not out, and carry on batting, which had been known.

Without a semblance of gloating, the bowler is left to reflect on his victory:

Once in my heyday of cricket,
One day I shall ever recall!
I captured that glorious wicket,
The greatest, the grandest of all.

Thus the great man recedes into the mists of time.