Lives in Cricket No 36 - WE Astill

95 him disliking is mosquitos, about which he wrote to an uncle on a postcard from Demerara, British Guiana [now Guyana] in 1930: We are having a very good time, but the cricket is rather strenuous. After we leave here, which is the worst place we visit, we get 3 weeks off before playing in Jamaica. That’s worth living for. Mosquitos are very bad here. We sleep under nets, but as soon as you get out, they do bite. Another reason for his delight in foreign climes was health: he hated what he found the damp, insalubrious and gloomy English winters, which were bad for his asthma. In a letter to Eileen Miller he wrote (in part): ‘I am not liking this winter in England, & I am so looking forward to the sunshine we are bound to get in Jamaica’. In 1935 The Cricketer was to raise the question posed by W.A.Osborne, Professor of Physiology at the University of Melbourne, as to whether ‘when a man misses winter after winter and his body prepares itself for the winter which does not come, he is physiologically upset’. For himself at least Astill had answered that six years previously when he wrote in the Sports Mercury : 179 [T]hough some people may think that it is possible for a player to get so much cricket by playing all the year round that he is likely to go stale, my own view is that by wintering abroad, and by taking the long sea voyages which are necessary, the ‘life’ of the professional player is definitely lengthened. 179 20 July 1929. The Tourist: ‘a Joy to Know’ Astill’s letter to his uncle, John Stinson Astill, complaining about the mosquitoes in what is now Guyana.