Lives in Cricket No 36 - WE Astill

15 The siblings’ births were not followed by baptism in the local parish church because of Ezra’s increasing devotion to the Ratby Primitive Methodist Church, with which he had always had a close connexion. In a typewritten letter of 1939 to the ‘Superintendents and Teachers of the Methodist Church Sunday School’ Ezra congratulated them on the centenary of the school, one of whose founders was his grandfather John Astill and a later superintendent of which was his uncle William Siddons. He himself attended the school from the age of four to sixteen, could recall more than a dozen teachers’ names and still had many happy memories: It is only when we look back across the years as I have been doing these last few days that we realize what a power for good the old Primitive Methodist Sunday School has been to the life of the village. Many of the scholars who have left the village through one cause or another and have made good owe their success to the teaching and influence of the School. That Ezra was thoroughly imbued with the ethos of the Methodist Church is clear from phrases in this letter such as ‘I hope to be with you in spirit’ and ‘who have passed over to receive their reward’ and especially from a letter that he sent in 1930 to comfort his sister on the death of her daughter who had ‘pass[ed] over to the Better Land’. 34 34 I am indebted to Colin Lissaman for sending me copies of the letters, both of which are in his possession. Ezra’s sister Sarah Ann, the widow of Tom Jayes, was married on the second occasion in the Parish Church, but this was probably the decision of her new husband Walter Crossley. William Ewart’s funeral in 1948 was held at the Victoria Road Church in Leicester. At the time of its erection in 1866 there was no other church in this part of the city, and its Baptist founders wished their neo-gothic place of worship to welcome non-conformists of all denominations. (See G.T.Rimmington, ‘Victoria Road Church, Leicester: a Victorian Experiment in Ecumenicity’, Transactions of the Leicester Archaeological and Historical Society 71 [1977], pp. 72-85.) Boyhood A man of the Church, Ezra Astill demonstrates his strong faith in his letter of condolence to his sister.