Lives in Cricket No 36 - WE Astill

5 Preface In the whole history of first-class cricket only nine players have both scored 20,000 runs and taken 2,000 wickets, Grace, Hirst and Rhodes, Astill, Woolley and Tate, Bailey, Titmus and Illingworth, three triads of all- rounders who respectively began their careers in the nineteenth century, played largely between the two World Wars and achieved these totals exclusively after the second conflict. Only one is alive today; and it is hardly conceivable that any other player will ever join this select group in the future unless either the whole structural organization of cricket is changed or the distinction between the highly disparate forms of modern cricket is abolished. 1 All these all-rounders played in Test cricket for England and all began and ended their county careers playing for the county of their birth. 2 Three came from Yorkshire and one each from Essex, Gloucestershire, Kent, Leicestershire, Middlesex and Sussex. Remarkably the great cricketing counties of Lancashire, Nottinghamshire and Surrey cannot boast a single such player between them. Eight of these players have their deeds and personalities enshrined in biographies; 3 the exception is William Ewart Astill, whose shade has had to be content with a few short articles, most notably one by R.C.Robertson-Glasgow (‘Crusoe’) in his More Cricket Prints . 4 Why is this so? Biographies were still fairly rare in his time except for often ‘ghosted’ reminiscences, and the modern age, with its view of county cricket as a mere breeding ground for the national team and the less wealthy and consequently weaker counties as mere breeding grounds 1 Some evidence that this latter is a possibility is afforded by the huge and shrill interest taken by media and followers of the game during 2011 and 2012 in Tendulkar’s attempts to score his hundredth century in a combination of Test and Limited-Over cricket, an interest far more intense than even that shown when Hobbs approached the same target in first-class matches alone in 1923. 2 I ignore Grace’s creation of ‘London County’, which he created with his friend W.L.Murdoch after his falling-out with Gloucestershire and which in its existence from 1900 to 1905 was never a part of the Championship. Apart from Grace, who participated as a given man in one match against Kent in 1870 and Titmus who played one match for Surrey in 1978, Illingworth is the only player to have appeared for more than one county, captaining Leicestershire for ten years before his return to his native Yorkshire in 1979: indeed he would not figure in this list but for his runs and wickets for Leicestershire. 3 Perhaps surprisingly Hirst, apart from a sixteen-page item by ‘Looker On’ (J.H.Stainton) published in mid-career in 1904 has to share his with Rhodes (A.A.Thomson, Hirst and Rhodes , London 1959). Perhaps he would not have minded, since they had been Yorkshire colleagues for many years and hailed from the same tiny village in the West Riding. 4 Others are the article in Wisden 1933 (pp 270-271), when he was one of the Five Cricketers of the Year and those by Basil Easterbrook, ‘Three Studies in Greatness’, Wisden (1978), pp. 156-157 and P.E.Dyson, ‘The Forgotten All- Rounder’, The Cricketer , March, 1988, pp 38-39.