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Only four players scored more career runs for Leicestershire and none took more wickets. One of only two county cricketers to have appeared in the Championship in every season between the Wars, Astill played a record 628 first-class matches for his county and achieved the ‘double’ of 1,000 runs and 100 wickets in a season on no fewer than nine occasions.
To the Leicestershire faithful he was the youngster of enormous promise and then the evergreen post-war veteran, who even more than his colleague George Geary shouldered the burden of their county’s bowling, and often their batting too, with a smiling chivalry and unwearied dedication that embedded him deep in their affections.
One of nine first-class cricketers to have achieved the 20,000 runs/2,000 wicket ‘double’, his meagre total of only nine caps for England – all abroad – was probably more a reflection of Leicestershire’s perceived status as an ‘unfashionable’ county, than Astill’s playing ability.
Off the field, Astill was a hugely popular figure who was a champion billiards player, a fine musician and an accomplished vocalist. He was frequently invited by leading representative teams to tour overseas and was seemingly the ‘life and soul of the party’ during off-field activities.
Fred Root called him ‘the most versatile cricketer’ he had ever known and David Frith’s opinion was that ‘Of the stalwarts who served their countries for almost a lifetime Ewart Astill of Leicestershire has an exalted place’; but for Leicestershire supporters he was simply the best-loved of all their heroes.
Autoren-Profil
As a small urchin A.R.Littlewood, whose paternal grandmother (neé Hirst) used to insist that she was related in some complicated way to the Yorkshire and England all-rounder George Hirst, was coached in the old winter-school shed at the Aylestone Road ground, where Ewart Astill had played most of his home matches.
He did not see his first county match until 1950, when he marvelled at a catch made by Paddy Corrall standing up to a full-blooded hit from a Northamptonshire batsman that he thought would go through the wicket-keeper (shortly before he died Paddy told him, ‘You can’t do anything else but catch those’). As a young grammar-school boy he used to perch on top of the ground scoreboard at Grace Road with a friend (whose mother once heard John Arlott mention the pair in a wireless commentary), operating the board for the county’s Second Eleven players, and actually being paid for the privilege when the Seconds had a match of their own. At the age of 13 he joined Clarendon Park Cricket Club (for which Darren Maddy of Leicestershire and England played years later) as wicketkeeper-batsman, but soon became an off break bowler and extraordinarily stodgy opening bat.
Once he had the thrill of playing on the Aylestone Road ground against whose home team of Leicester Electricity he recorded his best figures of seven for 20. Eventually deciding to take academic matters more seriously, he played little cricket at Leeds and Oxford, but while the club was in existence played for a few years in Canada. For many years he watched Leicestershire whenever he could on research trips to England and kept up his completely idiosyncratic county records. Now retired as Professor from the Department of Classics, he has a little more time to devote to cricket whenever the peremptory demands of Byzantine gardens and Byzantine manuscripts and his desire to travel to wild and remote parts of the world permit.
