Lives in Cricket No 36 - WE Astill

108 The Tour of India players to the teams met by MCC for, having appeared as both a European of the East and an All-Indian in Calcutta, the Cambridge University and Essex player now prevented an MCC victory as a member of the Rangoon Gymkhana and then succumbed as an All-Burmese in the second match. 206 Astill played in neither encounter, but doubtless enjoyed the hospitality of the Rangoon Gymkhana Club and sights such as the great zedi (stupa) Shwedagon Paya, Kipling’s ‘golden mystery’ and ‘winking wonder’. Then another voyage, on the S.S.Ethiopia , returned the party to India, to Madras [now Chennai], where Tate was attracted by among the spectators ‘ten thousand natives looking on … all in white clothes and holding up umbrellas as a shield from the sun’. 207 Astill played in all three games, his best feats being a spell of three for seven and a score of 54 in great heat against an Indian XI before he was run out. In the one-day game against Madras Europeans he bowled their top scorer, a local tea-planter named Ernest Cowdrey, father-to-be of his future pupil and protégé Michael Colin Cowdrey. As happened also later in Jamnagar, for a memento of their visit to Madras all the players were presented with an album of photographs, one of which depicts Astill smiling at his friend Wyatt’s straight stick in mock batting stance at the Government House Garden Party. Included also are Mercer and Parsons with, as Wyatt put it to me, ‘their lady-friends’. Leaving the shady banyans and cocoa-nut palms of Madras the touring party passed by train through the ‘dripping, oozy paddy-fields that swarm with snipe, toddy-palms, tanks and gheels wherein men fish and buffaloes 206 To complicate matters further, he was born in Calcutta and after his active playing career was for many years M.P. for Chelmsford, served as President of the MCC and was honoured with a knighthood. 207 My Cricketing Reminiscences , p 105. Bob Wyatt plays a ‘straight stick’ at the Government House Garden Party watched by (from l to r) Jack Mercer, Jack Parsons and Ewart Astill.