Lives in Cricket No 36 - WE Astill

164 The Coach When I asked him if there was a possibility that he would have been a Leicestershire player if Ewart Astill had lived longer, he replied: ‘Oh yes, I would: there’s no doubt about it.’ Typically he did not blame the county for losing interest in him. People, he said, expected him to make hundreds the next year, but he ‘struggled’. [In fact his figures for Tonbridge in 1946 and 1947 are similar.] ‘Why should [Leicestershire] be interested in me, a fourteen-year-old? Really it was a different age.’ Astill, he firmly believed, would not have let that happen; and so, though continuing to play for Ivanhoe, he also represented Kent Young Amateurs. What would have been Ewart Astill’s final great contribution to his county thus dissipated when the man who later told me on the doorstep of his home as I was leaving ‘Oh yes, I always expected to be a Leicester boy’ became the great Kent (and England) stalwart. 286 The catalyst for Astill’s lung cancer we cannot, of course, identify. He did smoke, but little – many who knew him even denied that he did at all. Nevertheless, he did smoke and in his time it would have been impossible to avoid second-hand smoke, especially at the numerous entertainments which he attended. He was, like his sisters (and some brothers?), asthmatic all his life – some forms of the condition are activity-related − and he hated the damp English winters. Nor can playing, training and coaching at the Aylesford Road ground, close to the power station and its smoke have helped his breathing. To Eric Snow, who met him at Grace Road in the summer of 1947, he still had the appearance of reasonable health, but that was probably on a particularly good day. He did, nevertheless, always look after himself well, even to the extent that in those days of still primitive dental prophylaxis when the surgeons wished to remove his false teeth, lest he choke during an operation, they discovered to their considerable surprise that they were his own. He remained cheerful, at least openly, to the end, and still took thought for others. When his aunt who had married Tom Jayes visited him in hospital she found herself leaving with more fruit than she had brought. But cancer can subdue even the strongest, which he was not, and most careful. When the surgeons did open his chest cavity, they quickly closed him up again and, his cousin Grace Briggs was almost certain, never told him – his case was hopeless. He died on 10 February 1948, of ‘carcinoma of the lung’ as recorded on the death certificate, which also gives his address as 18 Shirley Road, the home of his sister Kathleen Snowden, where he had been living. Obituaries variously state that he died in a hospital or a nursing home in Leicester: in fact he died at the no-longer existent Lawns Nursing Home at 312 London Road. The informant was his brother Lawson of Knighton Church Road. All these addresses are fairly close to the old family home of Houghton House. Financially he died in comfortable circumstances, for in his will he was able to leave £2,172 6s 5d, equivalent to about £62,000 today (2013). The funeral, conducted by Rev A.H.Kirkby, was at the non-denominational 286 Curiously years later Kent made a similar blunder when another man born in their county was allowed to play for Leicestershire after a simple telephone call from the latter’s chief executive Mike Turner. His name was David Gower.