Lives in Cricket No 36 - WE Astill

78 Hutchinson completed his third ‘double’ in succession. Having taken a further four wickets in his county’s last encounter of the season at Hove, he found himself, remarkably for a player from an ‘unfashionable’ county like Leicestershire, with four representative games to play in September. In the Scarborough Festival he made negligible contributions in his second Gentlemen v Players match of the season, but then promptly made amends, for whereas Yorkshire had conceded only a single individual century at home all year long they now were ravaged by two as Astill (102) and Arthur Gilligan (100) put up a whirlwind 172 together for the eighth wicket in 110 minutes which ‘changed the complexion of the game completely’. Astill had started slowly and cautiously, but later according to Pelham Warner he ‘cut both late and square with great certainty and effect, and used his feet well to jump out to drive ... In every way it was an admirable innings’. 145 A more sedate 40 followed at The Oval for The Rest of England (against the same opposition as Champion County) before he ended his season at the Hastings Festival, taking four of the first five wickets of Lord Cowdray’s XI (including Hobbs caught by Sutcliffe off his first ball on the second day) but falling himself for a mere eight runs to his friend George Geary. The many blank days of the dolefully wet summer of 1924 caused several counties to seek methods of escaping bankruptcy; and Leicestershire, in the persons of treasurer Dr R.MacDonald and secretary S.C.Packer, presented a proposal at Lord’s that, in the event of rain, the whole pitch should be covered for 24 hours before the scheduled commencement of a match, a proposal that met with partial success in that this was made permissible but not compulsory. As a consequence of the climatically induced reduction in the amount of cricket played the number of players performing the ‘double’ tumbled from the usual dozen or so to but three – Tate, Rhodes and Astill, a notable company, in which Astill beat the ‘Tyke’ to the target by two days. That he failed by four to take 100 wickets for his county is surely owing to the fact that in late June he twisted his ankle against Gloucestershire, ‘his foot apparently being caught in a hole’, and was unable to take part in Leicestershire’s next three matches. He had already missed the fixture with Glamorgan through selection for the Test Trial match. Nothwithstanding, among regular players he easily headed his county’s batting in aggregate as well as average, and as part of a very penetrative bowling quartet took the second-most wickets to Geary and was third in average behind Geary and Alan Shipman. 146 Strong bowling so compensated for weak batting that Leicestershire were able to win two more matches than in the previous year and move up to eleventh place in the Championship. The county’s season began against the South Africans who, having ‘passed by large tracts of flooded countryside’ were welcomed at the Midland Railway Station not only by officials but also by E.G.Hayes, King and Astill, 145 Quoted proudly by the Leicester Mercury , 11 September 1923, and repeated in The Cricketer , October 1923, p 10. 146 The averages of these three bowlers and of Skelding are the more noteworthy since at this time the Leicester wicket was ‘one of the best in England’ ( The Cricketer Annual, 1924-25 , p 13). The First ‘Doubles’