Lives in Cricket No 36 - WE Astill

118 The Test Player 11 runs between them. The exception was Astill whose defensive innings reached 38 and brought him his 1,000 runs for the season as early as 23 June. His average was, for him, dizzily over 60. Rain cut short this match and in subsequent weeks any chance he had of making his total 2,000. Indeed, he scored only two more fifties, both in rain-spoiled drawn matches, an initially cautious 58 at Old Trafford and a thoroughly confident 84 at Cheltenham, ‘a first-class example of the rewards of patience when the situation demands that patience shall be exercised’. In late July the MCC team under the captaincy of R.T.Stanyforth was announced for the winter tour of South Africa, which was to include five genuine Test matches. Astill was among those named together with his county colleagues Geary and Dawson. Would he have been one of the elect if the team had been chosen after his miserable August? Given the composition of the party, it was clear also that, batsman though he was, Astill was intended to play a more important rôle as a bowler; and so it was ironic that he had never had a less successful season in that capacity since the last few years before the Great War. And what of his age? Two years before, in an article published in the Leicester Mercury, Hobbs had complained about the emphasis on youth in the selection of England teams, but even so admitted that a bowler’s best period should be between 25 and 30. That is when he has his full strength and energy … after 30 he begins to feel the strain. After a hard day he is afflicted with that stiff and tight feeling that comes to the bowler who is that age. 223 Although Hobbs was doubtless thinking more of fast bowlers than slow or medium, Astill was due to turn not 30 but 40 shortly after the conclusion of the tour. Admittedly MCC did not know this, believing that he was two years younger, for Astill had informed the authorities a few years previously that he had been born in 1890 rather than 1888 in the hope that he could still win a Test cap, as he once cheerfully admitted to C.P.Snow. 224 But whether he was 37 or 39 at the time of selection he was clearly no longer as penetrative a force as he had been in earlier years, although ‘Reynard’ hopefully wrote that ‘Playing summer and winter has not rendered him stale, for he is playing as well and enthusiastically as ever, and certainly looking as young as in pre-war days’. 225 He began his tour in the third match with negligible contributions against Orange Free State, but despite arriving from Bloemfontein in 223 A similar article had appeared under Hobbs’ name in The Cricketer Winter Annual of 1921/22 (p 12), where he opined that ‘a batsman can play first-class cricket to a greater age than can a bowler, not so much because of the greater strain upon the latter as because the finger manipulation and “devil” needed in the bowler is … lacking after he passes the age of, say, forty-five’ [sic !]. 224 Snow knew Astill and gave his name and those of several other Leicestershire cricketers to characters in his series of novels known collectively as Strangers and Brothers . It was not uncommon at this period for cricketers to subtract years from their age for the same purpose. Wisden first recorded his date of birth in the 1907 edition (simply April 1888), changing it to 1 March 1890, in its 1923 edition and not getting it right (1 March, 1888) until 1951, three years after his death. According to the late Philip Thorn, ‘no [fewer] than 47 England Test cricketers claimed to be younger th[a]n they actually were’ (‘Just How Old Are You?’, The Cricket Statistician, 112, pp 19-20). 225 Leicester Sports Mercury , 18 July 1927.