Lives in Cricket No 36 - WE Astill

163 The Coach determined that I would be a Leicester boy.’ Astill looked after him and, since it was the benefit year of the county’s most prolific batsman, Les Berry, he enabled him to play in a few of those games. The big one was at the Dog and Gun ground in Blaby where there was a huge crowd … and I batted with Leslie Berry; we put on quite a lot together and I got 19 with their help (they dropped me a couple of times deliberately). Leslie Berry said ‘we must look after this boy, we must keep him in’. Leslie Berry (marvellous old boy) looked after me and we had a marvellous time – batting with Leslie Berry and Maurice Tompkin (he too was a marvellous man) was unbelievable. So I was deeply involved with Leicestershire, [but] then I came back to play in a Young Amateurs’ game for Kent at The Oval – I had just the one match – and Ewart Astill was furious about that, he was bitterly disappointed that here was I going off to play for Kent and he said, ‘Look, you’re going to play for Leicester,’ and he fixed me up with Leicester Ivanhoe, and so I came to play for Leicester Ivanhoe for two or three years thanks to Ewart. That winter Astill went to coach in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), 284 but, finding the altitude ‘quite difficult’ for breathing, according to Cowdrey, he returned early and ill. By late winter 1947 it was clear that he would not be able to coach at Tonbridge that summer. He ‘felt awfully sad and guilty’ about not being able to continue and was replaced, on his recommendation, by his fellow-Ratby all-rounder Alan Shipman. For Cowdrey this was the sad thing, I had him for only that one summer, and also I knew him not as an equal but just as a junior and to me he was a chap who had done the ‘double’ so many times … crikey, I couldn’t believe it. It was just such a shame I didn’t have him when I was a captain, in fact if I had had him four years later it would have made a great difference to me because I should have been able to talk to him on a level about cricket; but I was never in that position, it was always Mr Astill. So the boy whom the Leicester Mercury called ‘young Michael Cowdrey, Ewart Astill’s protégé’, lost the man whom he called ‘my soul-mate, my greatest adviser and supporter’. He saw him only once more, on a visit to Leicester the following summer. As for Leicestershire, they made their second, and greater, immediate post-war blunder. Having already let George Dawkes slip through their fingers, 285 they now failed to hold onto Cowdrey. 284 Cowdrey thought that he had been in South Africa again, but David Kemp was adamant that it was Southern Rhodesia. Shipping records show that he sailed from Southampton to Durban on M.V.Winchester Castle on 18 December 1946, apparently with the intention of ‘permanent residence’ in Rhodesia. At his funeral was a wreath from the Rhodesian Cricket Union, suggesting a formal connection with that organization. 285 This is not the official line, but Dawkes for a very strong familial reason needed to stay in Leicester and earnestly desired to continue playing for the county. Eventually, having turned down an attractive offer from Gloucestershire, he accepted one from Derbyshire, with whom he had a long and successful career, commuting throughout from his Leicester home.