Lives in Cricket No 36 - WE Astill

103 The Tour of India team, the First World War and other problems delayed acceptance for a decade and a half. C.E.Newham, the author of a pre-tour publication written on behalf of the Lahore Gymkhana, 194 spoke of ‘a certain amount of disappointment among Indian cricketers’ over Hobbs and Sutcliffe refusing invitations, yet he admitted that ‘MCC could hardly have raised a stronger bowling side … for Tate, Geary and Astill are a fine trio’. It was a physically taxing tour of four and a half months’ cricket interspersed with nearly 7,500 miles of travelling, and the players were away from home for over six months. Everything was unfamiliar - the pitches, the weather (especially ‘the dazzling, exhausting, baking, cooking, deceptive sun’ 195 ), the people, the food, the flora, the fauna, the geography, the huge distances covered and the sights that they were taken to visit from the glories of the Mughal era to fantastic Hindu temples with their superabundance of strange gods so far removed from the images in their churches at home. And they found themselves taking tiffin and learning new words like sahib, babu, shikari and ghari-wallah. The Leicestershire pair had probably been given advice from their county captain, Major G.H.S.Fowke, who years earlier had been stationed in the Punjab, scored five centuries in successive visits to the wicket and recorded at Peshawar the first triple-century made in India, 309 for the Gordon Highlanders against the Queen’s Regiment in 1905. But nothing could have prepared the pair for the reality of India. Originally 36 matches were scheduled, but during the voyage out this number was cut down to 34. Four were one-day games, the remainder, all ranked first-class, two-day (21) and three-day (9). For most players this was like a complete county season. 194 The M.C.C. in Northern India, Civil and Military Gazette, Lahore and London [1927 ] 195 Headlam (p 24), who devotes three pages to the sun which ‘in England … is a thing to be thankful for and to bask in: in India it is a thing to curse and dread’. All smartly dressed in their blazers, this MCC India Tour Party includes Astill (seated second from the right) and his Leicestershire colleague, George Geary (fourth from the left in the middle row).