Lives in Cricket No 36 - WE Astill

18 he had a lot of impolite things to say. “One thing he said which I remember best of all was this: ‘You know you’ll never make any money by playing cricket!’ Well, as I say, I haven’t forgotten that, and whenever I see that gentleman nowadays, I don’t let him forget it, either!” He is very modest about his music, which, at least in his later life, extended to more instruments than just the pianoforte. 36 Encouragement and genes certainly came from his father’s side of the family (I have no information of his mother’s). An uncle was the organist at Ratby Methodist Church, and in his letter to the superintendents and teachers of its Sunday School Ezra writes: “I have always been a lover of the Sabbath and its services. When I was 14 wasn’t I a proud boy when I was asked to play the harmonium. My uncle, William Siddons, the Superintendent, would give me the hymns one Sunday for the next so that I could practise the tunes”. There being no properly organized cricket at Ratby Board School, such began for William Ewart only at the age of 13. He tells us himself no more than this: “When I got a bit older my father’s business took him to Leicester, and naturally I went, too; and it was in Leicester that I first joined a proper club. A Sunday-school cricket club it was – like those many of you belong to, I dare say – and in time I became captain of that club”. According to the 1901 census the youngster was working as an accounts clerk in Ratby, but that year the family moved to Leicester, where his father opened his furniture business. Perhaps his father intended his eldest son to have the same training as himself before entering the familial firm, for William Ewart continued to work in accountancy. Certainly his father was not averse from having a child working with him, for in time all his five other sons became directors in the business and remained so until it eventually ceased trading in 1962. The cricket club to which he refers was the Manor Club in the Leicester Mutual Sunday School League. According to the census of 1901 Ezra, listed as an insurance agent, had moved his family to 57 Gaul Street, Leicester, and in 1911 to 70 Braunstone Gate, but certainly by 1920 at the latest their home was Houghton House at 234 London Road, 37 the A6 trunk road, which was the main route from Leicester to London before the opening of the M1 motorway. It follows roughly, rather than exactly, the same course as the old ‘London Waye’. 38 Houghton House was one of a pair of three-storey semi-detached houses on the eastern side of the main road immediately south of Mayfield Road at the south-eastern corner of Victoria Park, on which William Ewart had played himself, as had W.G.Grace many years earlier. Thus it was very close to the position of the tollgate, after this had been moved from the 36 See Chapter 13. 37 The numbering of the houses here was not made, however, until the 1930s. 38 By 1675 this was known as the ‘Harborough Way’ because it led initially to Market Harborough. See further H.Boynton and D.Seaton, From Tollgate to Tramshed , pp 13-14. Boyhood