Lives in Cricket No 36 - WE Astill

91 Chapter Nine The Tourist: ‘a Joy to Know’ 167 Since he played in two matches for S.B.Joel’s XI in the winter of 1924/25 when he was coaching in South Africa, record books account those matches as constituting his first tour. More realistically his first came the following winter for MCC in the West Indies; and thereafter he was away so often that the subject became a quiz question in the Leicester Evening Mail . But, apart from the raw scores, details of his performances on tours are scant, since no tour book was ever published about any of them. 168 Nevertheless, the reasons why he was considered so good a tourist are easy to find. Today, despite the much trumpeted bonding of the England squad, players do not spend long periods of time together other than in training, practising and actually playing matches. Transport is speedy, association with hosts kept to a minimum and leisure largely devoted to individuals’ electronic gadgetry. In Astill’s day transport was slow, no cricket-playing country being closer than about ten days by sea; socializing with a wide range of hosts, who ranged from presidential and viceregal to local, from military to commercial, from public to private and from cricketing to non- cricketing, was at times more taxing than what the tourists had to do on the field, and assuredly demanded greater social skills; and what leisure they had was largely spent in each other’s company, with cricket-talk and card-playing being the common occupations. For a team’s harmony and success and for ambassadorial purposes non-cricketing qualities were far from unimportant. Ewart Astill would probably not have been worth his place in purely cricketing terms for a tour of Australia; but for Test matches elsewhere a fairly strong case could be made for him. In non- cricketing terms he had few if any equals; and Bob Wyatt believed that Lord Harris was behind his selection on a number of occasions because he considered him ‘a very cheerful chap … a great asset in keeping the side joyful’. Bob Wyatt always remembered him as ‘a happy man’. He got on well with everybody because, as Colin Cowdrey said years later, Ewart was such a good man, such a generous man: there was no malice in him, everybody liked him … he was very charming and humorous. He was a marvellous chap to take on tour because you need that sort of person who can bowl all day, bat when you ask them [ sic ] to, field, fall in, be friendly in the dressing room, be friendly in the homes where you stayed. You couldn’t have a more all-round chap … He had huge 167 ‘[A]s a team-mate and opponent he was a joy to know’ (Frith, The Slow Men , p 99). 168 The nearest things are a few pre-tour pamphlets, the most substantial by far being one from what is now Pakistan before the Indian tour of 1926/27 (C.E.Newham, The M.C.C. in Northern India ).