Lives in Cricket No 36 - WE Astill

140 Chapter Thirteen The Captain In the 1930s all counties were still in thrall of the unchallengeable conviction that an amateur must always be captain. There was some justification at least for the preference of an amateur: since an amateur was not dependent upon his place in the team for his livelihood, it was believed that he could be more adventurous both in his own batting (and how rarely was an amateur a bowler!) and in willingness to risk defeat through an attempt to win rather than play safe and let a match degenerate into a stultifying draw. An amateur, however, was also generally conceded to come from a ‘superior’ class, the class of ‘natural’ leadership and be also of a superior intellect, for little had changed since A.G.Steel, in the common confusion of education with intelligence, 255 had declared that Amateurs always have made, and always will make, the best captains … An educated mind, with a logical power of reasoning, will always treat every subject better than one comparatively untaught. 256 Although this conviction was not as harmful as the selection of ‘fancy caps’ in August to the detriment of professionals’ pride and pay, it could still be bogus or ridiculous. In the nineteenth century many English amateurs, never mind tourists from Australia, had received startlingly generous ‘expenses’, and in the twentieth some had received from their clubs well remunerated sinecures as the only way in which they could claim amateur status. The ridiculous came about when a club appointed a cricketing incompetent as captain simply because he was an amateur. The Leicestershire committee was, therefore, in a dilemma as the 1935 season approached. The Hon A.G.Hazlerigg of Eton and Cambridge, descendant of one of William the Conqueror’s knights, son of the county captain of 1907 to 1910 and later to become second Baron, had some cricketing ability, but he had proved uninspiring as a leader, had become increasingly disenchanted with the daily burden of the county game and had resigned late the preceding season. His successor, Flight-Lieutenant Karl Beisiegel, gave a higher priority to a career in the RAF than to the Leicestershire captaincy. Salvation seemed to have come from Sir Julien Cahn, who had extended his cricketing beneficence over Nottinghamshire’s southern border. 257 To strengthen his private cricket team even more, he 255 Years ago a letter-writer in my local newspaper, complaining about inequalities in educational opportunities, asserted that ‘everyone has a right to equal intelligence’. 256 Steel and Lyttelton, Cricket , p 192. Astill’s old colleague Knight, in one of his thoughtful weekly columns for the Leicester Mercury in 1904 (30 July), had written in ‘praise of that rara avis, the amateur’, especially as captain, and concluded that he ‘is the real democrat and revolutionary’. 257 For his extraordinary career see M.Rijks, The Eccentric Entrepreneur: a Biography of Sir Julien Cahn , Stroud, 2008.