Lives in Cricket No 36 - WE Astill

88 The All-round Sportsman billiards player at the table, celebrated respectively ‘W.E.Astill Leicester Amateur Champion 1920’ and his break of 115, presumably the highest of the competition, at the same championship. The three other medallions are one of copper to celebrate the Lord’s Ground centenary of 1914 with Astill’s name on a scroll beneath wickets, bats and a ball; a second, again, of copper, showing batsman, wicket and two fielders, which was presented to players in the West Indies v England Test match at Trinidad in 1930; the last, of silver, celebrating the match between Leicestershire and All- India [sic] in 1936, on one side of which is a resplendent fox, the county emblem. His interest in billiards was nonetheless not restricted to the orthodox playing of the game. Colin Cowdrey recalled: My father had played against Ewart Astill in India and had come to know him quite well because they both loved billiards, and Ewart was a champion billiards player … marvellous with all the trick shots and playing spins with the balls, and my father was good at all that and loved it and learned quite a lot from him and always had this happy memory of him spinning the billiard ball around the table, something that he did very expertly [with both cue and fingers]. Ewart Astill was absolutely brilliant at throwing a ball up the table and having it go round a red, come down a cushion and then into the bottom pocket: he was absolutely a master – and my father was too: he learned it from Ewart on the occasion of that short visit [in Madras in 1927]. Another trick on the billiards table was remembered by Ben Martin, a second-team player at Leicester in the late 1930s, who mentioned how he threw a billiard ball with spin onto the table so that it would go into any pocket nominated. The younger Cowdrey thought him ‘so deft’ that he suspected him of being a member of the ‘Magic Circle’, while Root declares that ‘his tricks with cue and ball are eagerly watched wherever he is willing to display them’. 162 To a somewhat lesser extent he had, as is common with billiards players, considerable expertise in snooker, but no record of successes or even participation in such competitions is known to me. It is also uncertain where he learned and practised these games, although we can make some guesses. The family home in Leicester was certainly large enough to accommodate a table, and his socially upward-moving father would have been able to afford one. During the winters his older colleague Jack King played billiards every day at the Leicester Liberal Club, and Astill, who also was a member, may well have done the same when he was in the city. There were almost certainly further opportunities at certain phases of his military career. He excelled also at table tennis, another game which probably delighted him in the scope it gave for spinning the ball. Hendren considered him ‘at the ping-pong table [as] a bit of a Borotra’. And one can imagine that at the Basque’s favourite game of lawn tennis he was again fascinated by angles 162 A Cricket Pro’s Lot , p 100.