Lives in Cricket No 36 - WE Astill

104 The Tour of India On 24 September, Lord Harris, who had served as Governor of the Presidency of Bombay from 1890 to 1895, bade the team 196 Godspeed at Tilbury with the words, as remembered by the captain A.E.R.Gilligan: ‘May you have all the luck that is going: the luck of the toss, the luck of the weather, and’ – his magnificent cough intervening – ‘the luck of the umpire’s decisions. Do not dare to take off your topee when out in the field, and never eat oysters up country.’ 197 There followed a three-week voyage on the P and O liner S.S.Narkunda , with the gentle exercise of deck sports, the romance and excitement of knowing that they were in the historic waters off Trafalgar, looking up to the great fortress that is the Rock of Gibraltar, searching for signs of activity from the volcanoes of Stromboli, passing through the Suez Canal, that ninety-mile gash in the desert, enduring their first taste of the oppressively sultry heat in the Red Sea, and going ashore at barren, blisteringly hot Aden, Britain’s ‘great sentinel’ to that sea. Then came the first sight of the subcontinent, Bombay (now Mumbai), already a huge polyglot city spreading far beyond the island taken over by the East India Company from Charles II for an annual rent of ten pounds in gold. Although class divisions still existed in England, here in India the cricketers first saw the immeasurable and impassable gulf between impoverished teeming masses and the stratospherically luxuriating princes. While not living the life of the latter they found themselves treated, nearly all for the only time in their lives, as members of a privileged society. Upon arrival they were assigned a personal servant, 198 became accustomed to being garlanded by reception committees and spectators, banqueted with high representatives of the ruling British Raj, were fêted by the British Army, were billeted with wealthy Anglo-Indian businessmen and tea-planters and met Indian maharajas. Thrice they played against and twice accommodated within their own team his Highness Bhupinder Singh, Maharaja of Patiala, a man with innumerable wives 199 and concubines and at least 88 known offspring, a member of the General Staff in Europe and Palestine during the Great War, Indian representative at the League of Nations and at the time Chancellor of the Indian Chamber of Princes. He possessed, as it was claimed, an example of every breed of dog, what was perhaps the world’s largest collection of medals and one of the largest collections of jewels, and a few years later, offended by Rolls-Royce for not accepting a further order, expressed his disgust by using other examples of that company’s choice vehicles (he had at least twenty) for collecting refuse in his capital. In one match he lost a pearl earring worth £10,000, about £480,000 at 196 Actually only seven of the team, for the remainder preferred to travel overland to Marseilles to avoid crossing of the Bay of Biscay. A photograph of a happy Astill at Tilbury, (in P.Wynne-Thomas, England on Tour: a Record of All England Cricket Tours Overseas, Hamlyn, London, 1982, p 78) shows that he was not one of the latter. 197 Quoted in J.D.Coldham, Lord Harris London, George Allen and Unwin, 1983, p 135. 198 These had already been carefully chosen, unlike the ‘rascally-looking natives who, on consideration of an exorbitant fee … were willing to give … their services’ to the Oxford University Authentics a quarter of a century earlier (Headlam, p 17). 199 Literally it seems, as different sources give divergent numbers.