Lives in Cricket No 36 - WE Astill

6 for the richer counties, 5 has little interest in a player who never appeared in a Test match in England and never against Australia. Astill, moreover, played for what is so often called an ‘unfashionable’ county; and he was too decent and nice a man ever to behave in any way likely to excite the scandal so loved today. Is Astill worth a biography? Eric Midwinter certainly thought so, including him in 1995 in his list of cricketers who should have one written of their exploits. 6 Do Astill’s inclusion in our band of nine and the facts that he either scored more runs or took more wickets than all but his predecessors Grace, Hirst and Rhodes and that only Rhodes, Hirst and V.W.C.Jupp performed the ‘double’ of 1,000 runs and 100 wickets in a season more frequently than his total of nine warrant a biography on grounds of sheer statistics? The detailed break-down of mere taking of wickets and accumulation of runs can, after all, be found with great ease in the digital age with its ever-growing ‘search-engines’. But cricket is more than statistics and Astill’s bowling was aesthetically pleasing to watch and fascinating to study in its variety, and his style of batting too was attractive to the eye. His fellow-cricketers with, it seems, no exception had a warm regard for him, his colleagues were so motivated by him as to excel themselves during his highly successful but all too brief spell of captaincy, and one of the finest of all post-war batsmen had deep affection for him as coach and mentor. Although he devoted his life to cricket, he was multi-talented and could have achieved success in other sports and also in music. To him as a man perhaps the greatest tribute came from the daughter of a county colleague, Jack King’s daughter Margaret, whose eyes lit up when I spoke to her about Astill: despite the nearly twenty-one years between them, she said ‘if only he had asked, I’d have married him like a shot’. So Ewart Astill is worth a biography; but can a worthy biography be written of him? If the tense were changed, the answer would indubitably be affirmative; but, in the dearth of all but scanty contemporary analyses of his technique and style and descriptions of his personality, the length of time since his death in 1948 makes the writing of a biography in 2013 an often frustrating task. With Philip Snow’s death in June 2012 I know of no-one alive today who remembers Astill in his playing days; and, since Astill never married, there are no familial memorabilia and no memories or anecdotes of a father, grandfather or great-grandfather. Fortunately, through the kind offices of Mike Turner and Jeremy Barlow, respectively the chief executive of Leicestershire CCC and the curator of the club’s museum, I was able nearly twenty years ago to have conversations with an aged sister, a cousin and a few players who had known him as preparation for a possible future biography, which, however, had to be postponed 5 Astill’s own county has perhaps suffered worst of all in this regard. The nadir, at least so far, was reached when the media not only voiced their expectation that the promising J.W.A.Taylor would break his contract to join a more wealthy county but registered no disapproval when he actually did so: indeed the opinion was expressed that it was in Leicestershire’s interest that he do so in order for the county to receive monetary compensation. 6 ‘Uncovered Cricketers’, Journal of the Cricket Society 17.2, 1995, p 27. Preface