Lives in Cricket No 10 - John Shepherd

began to shift, this did change, 7 but the hangover from the divided past was still a factor when John Shepherd started to play club cricket in the 1960s. The attitudes and behaviour of all members of touring sides to the West Indies had not always been beyond reproach either. On the 1953/54 MCC tour, for example, Len Hutton the England captain, was reported from the start of the tour as saying ‘these black bastards don’t like us’ 8 – a casually offensive prejudice which hardly endeared the overwhelmingly black West Indian team to their visitors. In John Shepherd’s youth, Barbados was a racially divided society and whilst he was never an activist he could see the signs all around him of ‘them and us’ – and they hurt. The white man had the house up on the hill with the pool and the servants and, as Shepherd left the country to pursue his professional career as a cricketer, he said to himself that one day he would return – and that he too would have a house on the hill. But race wasn’t the only discriminator that Shepherd was to encounter either at home or when he came to Kent. In the year of John’s arrival at the county, 1965, the list of Kent’s living Past Presidents included not just the fifth Lord Harris but the Lords Astor and Cornwallis, a Major-General and a couple of Colonels as well. In addition there was a powerful influence at the club of those who were members of the ‘Band of Brothers’, widely known as ‘BB’, an invitation-only and exclusive cricket club of great antiquity that played a full fixture list of matches against public schools like Tonbridge and King’s Canterbury and elitist clubs such as the Eton Ramblers, the Hurlingham Club and I Zingari. Mike Denness 9 recalls that chairmen of Kent were nearly always ‘BB’ – as were leading figures such as the Cowdreys, Ames, David Clark, Stuart Chiesman, Jim Swanton and most committee members. Denness sees the BB involvement as counter-productive because it perpetuated the recently abolished amateur/professional distinctions amongst the players: the BB members would only talk to the ‘amateurs’ such as Cowdrey – it was very snobbish indeed. It also meant that hirings and firings were done neither by hired professional managers nor with any vestige of a consultative process – but by a cliquey and unelected elite. The separate changing rooms for the ‘Gentlemen’ and the ‘Players’ at some county grounds may have disappeared but there was at Kent, a clear distinction between the captain, M.C.Cowdrey, (of Tonbridge, Oxford University and Band of Brothers – who had always had his initials in front of his name and had regularly appeared for and captained the Gentlemen) and the ‘players’ making up the rest of the team. In the mid-sixties this was still a world of privilege and deference. Cowdrey was to be Shepherd’s friend and mentor – the man who had the perception to see that Shepherd could be a success in county cricket despite his limited experience, and the man who made Shepherd feel at home as soon as he arrived in England. But there was always a patrician air 8 Introduction 7 Grantley Adams became Barbados’ first black Prime Minister in 1954. 8 Letter from E.W.Swanton to Viscount Cobham in May 1956, reported by David Rayvern Allen in Jim: The Life of E.W.Swanton , Aurum Press, 2004. 9 Interview with the author, 16 October 2008.