Lives in Cricket No 36 - WE Astill

113 [George V] … displayed in the study at Buckingham Palace’ 215 ? O Powers that be, make me to observe and keep the rules of the game. Help me not to cry for the moon. Help me neither to offer nor to welcome cheap praise. Give me always to be a good comrade. Help me to win, if I may win, but – and this, O Powers, especially – if I may not win, make me a good loser. Sightseeing, music and banqueting were naturally also parts of the players’ entertainment, as was the viewing of ‘Ranji’s’ jewellery of which the emerald collection, according to his friend the jeweller Jacques Cartier, was ‘unequalled in the world, if not in quantity, then certainly in quality’. Nonetheless, most time in Nawanagar was spent hunting. 216 Hunting for sport was for many centuries a monopoly of monarchs, inscriptions in the Middle East from as long ago as the second millennium BC confirming this; and the killing of wild beasts was symbolic of power, hence the recording of numbers slain by the royal hand. 217 We with our modern sensibilities must be wary of condemning ways of the past, and in this particular note that only in very recent years have rulers given up the practice or at least have tried to keep it hidden from public knowledge − as recently as April 2012 King Juan Carlos of Spain tried, unsuccessfully as it turned out, to conceal his elephant-shooting trip to Botswana, at least as claimed by the press. During the British Raj local princes continued their time-honoured indulgence and extended it to Anglo-Indians and overseas lords and gentlemen. Most if not all of these princes undoubtedly enjoyed the sport, but, in part to ingratiate themselves with the Raj, they increasingly put on ‘arranged’ hunts for their visitors, the nadir being domestically born big-game animals and the sewing-up of the eyelids of big cats. For this the chief blame must be laid at the feet of visitors eager for trophies that could give them excuse for telling exaggerated tales of their own valour back home. 218 Some of the MCC players were accustomed to shooting ‘vermin’ and small game in England (Astill had learned to shoot in Leicestershire) and welcomed the chance of bagging something bigger and more dangerous. Even the unexperienced, however, were expected to try their hand now – who wanted to be a ‘sissy’? Wyatt called Tate the world’s best bowler, but worst shot; yet the latter devotes a whole chapter to hunting and writes: Ranji’s underground rooms were a revelation. I should think he had one of the most marvellous collections of skins and other trophies of the chase in the world. He also had a private zoo in which was an animal very few people have seen, with a lion’s head and a tiger’s body [could this have been a liger or tigon?]. 215 M.A.Tanfield in The Cricketer , 1 September 1934, p 551. 216 On ‘Ranji’s’ hospitality and meticulous arrangements for his guests’ hunting see The Cricketer vol. 6 for 23 May, 1925, pp. 67-68. 217 See, for instance, A.R.Littlewood, ‘Gardens of the Palaces’ in H.Maguire (ed), Byzantine Court Culture from 829 to 1204 , Washington DC, 1997, pp 13-38, esp. 19-21. 218 Hunting was commonly arranged for the Oxford Authentics, but two members stayed on a few weeks after the tour for ‘real’ hunting in Kashmir (Headlam, Ten Thousand Miles , pp 237-69). The Tour of India