Lives in Cricket No 36 - WE Astill

106 The Tour of India missed a night-time visit to a ram fight and a banquet in full evening dress. His indisposition persisted and he was unable to play in either of the two games at Ajmer in Rajputana from where some of the team were taken on an excursion to see sacred crocodiles. He was probably relieved to spend the following two and a half weeks in one centre, Bombay, before the travelling recommenced, not that the team’s stay there was quiet and unhurried. A meal of bread, cheese and beer awaited the team on arrival at the station before they began a hectic whirl of cricket, entertainment, sightseeing and banqueting, once at the Willingdon Club founded a few years previously by Lord Willingdon when the Bombay Gymkhana refused to allow his Indian companion to enter its premises. Astill, who was one of five privileged to be lodged at Government House as a guest of the governor Sir Lesley Wilson, played in the five matches on the Gymkhana ground, taking 16 wickets in all, with a best performance before 45,000 spectators of five for 75 in an innings of 356 by the previous year’s winners of the Quadrangular Tournament, the Hindus, against whom Tate, who completed the ‘double’ on the tour, was for once helpless. The Bombay Presidency experienced his first half-century (53), following which he was selected for the first unofficial Test against All-India. In this drawn match, dominated by batting, he perhaps gained most satisfaction from having the charismatic character and devastating hitter C.K.Nayudu, who had hit consecutive sixes off him for the Hindus, out for the second time on the tour, stumped by Brown. Four days later, after a party at the Hindu Gymkhana Club, a train journey (in first-class carriages as usual) took the team across the subcontinent to Calcutta (now Kolkata) in Bengal, once the great clearing house for the East This Rawalpindi & District v MCC teams photograph, before their game at in November 1926, shows Astill standing third from the left in the back row.