Lives in Cricket No 36 - WE Astill

the side owing to indifferent performances. In its obituary Wisden notes, presumably with regard largely to the post-Great War years, that ‘few men with such a lot of work thrust upon them have retained their form so consistently over a long career’. David Frith rightly observed that he ‘thrived on work’. 60 In each of eight seasons in his thirties and early forties he bowled over one thousand overs, the most being 1,278 at the age of 40. Cowdrey commented that in his tireless long spells he resembled Maurice Tate who, if taken off before lunch, would be puzzled and wonder what he was doing wrong. Even at the age of 58 and in declining health Astill never seemed to get tired when bowling in the nets at Tonbridge, as David Kemp, then one of the boys at the school, recalled. Astill suffered from asthma, a genetic disability shared by some of his siblings, but fortunately he was able to keep this under control during his playing career; and until his final, fatal illness health was rarely a problem, only the odd match being missed and that for nothing more serious than a cold. He was also generally free of injuries, and strains rarely incommoded him. The latter were probably less common than today when excessive physical ‘conditioning’ often renders cricketers highly-tuned but delicate specimens of humanity; and anyway players of Astill’s generation preferred to keep quiet about strains to save themselves from the more painful pummelling of the trainer’s table. Contemporary descriptions have him as a slow, a slow-medium or a medium-paced bowler, but these terms are fairly subjective and did not mean the same eighty or ninety years ago as they do today when a ‘slow’ bowler may be operating at seventy or even more miles an hour. 61 Astill, moreover, varied his speed considerably not only in accord with the dictates of the wicket but also the propensities of individual batsmen. The distant photograph of him bowling, in Barbados in 1929, shows him having run a few yards down the pitch in his follow-through unlike some fellow-spinners who barely moved beyond the popping crease except perhaps laterally. Towards the end of his career, his range of speed was much reduced and he could safely be categorized as ‘slow’, although Jim Sperry told me that, even at the age of 50, ‘e were quicker than some’. Don Bradman, who played against him at Aylestone Road in 1930, described him as ‘a slowish off spinner’. Whatever his speed, however, he was always a spinner and unlike Jack King, his partner on many occasions, he did not, it seems, become a medium-paced swing bowler when opening the bowling, 62 which he did regularly especially in the best seasons of his pre- war career and later in the early 1920s. When in conjunction with a fast bowler he thus provided unsettling variety for the batsmen and relief for his partner who preferred bowling with the wind, while Astill’s flight was 60 The Slow Men , p 99. 61 Frith observes that, admittedly from an even earlier generation, the Australian C.T.B.Turner ‘could hardly be classified as a slow bowler, though his speed, 55 mph, measured at Woolwich Arsenal in 1888, would seem to compare with Bedi’s’ ( The Slow Men , p 100). 62 Cowdrey, however, believed that he would on these occasions have bowled swingers and cutters at a speed comparable with that of Sydney Barnes and faster than that of d’Oliveira. 33 The Bowler