Lives in Cricket No 36 - WE Astill

102 Chapter Ten The Tour of India Most English cricket tours of India are dominated by a sense of hardship: a feeling that the entire country, the weather, the food, the beggars, the taxi-drivers and the sacred cows that roam the streets are all against them. 190 That, unfortunately, seems to be true today, even though the last three are generally seen only through the windows of a charabanc and western food is readily available – only from the weather are cricketers not protected. Even foreign participants in the IPL, unless they are particularly adventurous, have little exposure to India proper. Such was not the case in the first half of the last century, when various members of the Oxford University Authentics even stayed on to explore the country further. Cecil Headlam summed up that first-ever English tour to the subcontinent with the words ‘We had done well, and we had been right royally done by our friends in India. No touring team ever had a better time or enjoyed it more.’ 191 Leicestershire had two representatives, Astill and Geary, on MCC’s pioneering and missionary tour to India, Burma and Ceylon 192 under the captaincy of A.E.R.Gilligan in 1926/27. Although for neither was this tour the pinnacle of his cricketing career, there are hints that from the non- cricketing point of view it was the most extraordinary few months of their lives, a time of wondrous experiences that neither of these villagers from middle England, even the more worldly and urbanised Astill, had ever envisaged, even in dreams, and of which both men spoke of years later with wistful wonder. And the pair were not alone: Maurice Tate, for instance, despite his mighty deeds for Sussex and England, devotes a tenth of his autobiography to this one tour, 193 and declares ‘I don’t suppose I shall ever again have such a wonderful trip as I did through India’. Although MCC was originally invited to tour in 1911 by the Maharaja of Patiala at the dinner they put on in London in honour of his All-India 190 S Barnes, The Meaning of Sport , Short Books, London, 2006, pp 289-90. 191 Ten Thousand Miles through India and Burma, J.M.Dent and Co, London, 1903, p 231. It is interesting to compare Headlam’s account of this tour in 1902/03 with what we learn from various sources about MCC’s tour in 1926/27 and with Major E.W.L.Ricketts’ account of MCC’s tour of 1933/34., ‘We Visit India in Search of Cricket’, The Cricketer Annual , 1934/35, pp 64-72. One thing that did not change was the standard of hospitality. 192 MCC wished to assess the standard of pitches and perhaps encourage the formation of a national cricket authority in India, which led to the granting of Test status in 1932. 193 Three chapters of My Cricketing Reminiscences , Stanley Paul and Co, London, n.d., pp 95-114. See also Andrew Hignell, Jack Mercer: a Bowler of Magical Spells , ACS Publications, Cardiff, 2011, pp 49-55.