The Noteworthy 'Others' of the Grace Era

[a massive zebra]

You're welcome, Mr Trundler. Glad to be of assistance.

If you are interested in this topic, I would very much recommend the books by H.S. Altham, A.W. Pullin and Simon Rae that I cited above.

 

[Starfighter]

9. Hitting a full toss was considered "bad manners" and smashing a long hop was considered "immoral". Grace changed all this by unifying the elements of batting, playing forward and back, playing the bat parrallel with the front pad, smashing all balls that deserved the treatment etc.

I'd be interested to know, but couldn't tell without a time machine, how true this actually is. I've generally suspected things such as this to have been much less adhered to in practice.



While generally dealing with a slightly later era a few period books that are available for free and without signing up for anything that are worth a look are:

W.G. Grace's Cricket (1891): https://archive.org/stream/cricketwgg00gracuoft?ref=ol#page/n1/mode/2up

A.G. Steel et al's Cricket (1898): https://archive.org/stream/cricket00langgoog?ref=ol#page/n8/mode/2up

Cricket edited by famous golfer Horace G. Hutchinson (1903): https://archive.org/stream/cricket00hutcrich?ref=ol#page/n9/mode/2up

R.H. Lyttelton's Cricket (1898): https://archive.org/stream/cricket01gracgoog?ref=ol#page/n6/mode/2up

Cricketing Reminiscences by W.G. Grace: https://archive.org/stream/wgcricketingremi00grac?ref=ol#page/n7/mode/2up

James Pycroft's The Cricket Field (1859): https://archive.org/stream/cricketfield00pycr?ref=ol#page/n7/mode/2up

And there's other too. Charles Box has a couple of histories, one from 1868 which somewhat belies its title (it's not a manual) but has an interesting critique of aspects of the laws, and one from 1877, George Selkirk's 1867 book, unfortunately incomplete in this edition, describes an interesting shot 'the draw', basically squeezing the ball past the stumps down between fine leg and long stop. And there's a few others wondering around OpenLibrary. I particularly recommend the first three I listed.

 

[mr_mister]

@massive zebra.

Are you telling me there were two famous 19th century bats named Tom Hayward. I only knew of the one who appeared later

 

[trundler]

@massive zebra.

Are you telling me there were two famous 19th century bats named Tom Hayward. I only knew of the one who appeared later

Uncle and nephew.

 

[fredfertang]

And to add to the potential for confusion Tom junior's father, Daniel, and his father, also Daniel, were First Class cricketers as well