Lives in Cricket No 10 - John Shepherd

about the Kent captain and he was the archetypical establishment figure. Even as close a colleague as Derek Underwood (a man from a similar English middle-class background as Cowdrey) never called his captain ‘Colin’ over twenty years of playing together – and John Shepherd certainly never did. As Peter Oborne succinctly puts it: ‘To get to grips with Cowdrey required an advanced understanding of the complexities of the English class system … .’ 10 This led, as we shall see in Chapter Five, to moments when there was an ambiguity about Cowdrey and his own motivations which complicated matters for John Shepherd at a time of stress in the world of cricket. John Shepherd was not just a consummate cricket professional but one of Kent’s very few overseas players in the early post-war decades as well. For twenty seasons from 1946 to 1966 the Kent team was almost entirely made up of players who were qualified to play for England 11 and, Stuart Leary apart, Shepherd, in 1967, was the first major break with this tradition. Like his compatriots in other counties – Roy Marshall, Gordon Greenidge, Keith Boyce – Shepherd had to qualify for two years before he could play in Championship matches. This was a grounding which, whilst no doubt frustrating at times, was hugely beneficial as not only did Shepherd get used to English conditions away from the spotlight but it allowed him to settle in what must have been quite an alien environment. From the start Shepherd was welcomed at Kent, not just at the County Cricket Club but also in the community at large. Shep reckons that he was one of only about five black people in Canterbury in 1965 but he cannot recall any moments of discrimination or difficulties caused by his race. This is not to say that there wasn’t some unwitting and not always informed and casual prejudice around. Shepherd remembers a match against Northamptonshire when Kent’s regular short-leg fieldsman was hit and Colin Cowdrey asked Shepherd to take his place saying: ‘You guys [ i.e. West Indians] have got better reflexes than we do.’ Much more serious than this was an incident in 1971, when Kent were playing Glamorgan at Folkestone. The Kent side was taking the field when an elderly spectator, and one-time committee-member, patted him on the back and said, ‘Good luck Sambo’. Unsurprisingly Shepherd performed poorly after this abuse 12 and also felt that the Kent captain in that match, the South African Stuart Leary, had been less than sympathetic to him after the incident. Shep eventually had to be calmed by Les Ames who said that he would insist on the member apologising – although this never happened. There are also some disturbing suggestions of prejudice on the part of some on the Kent committee when Shepherd, in many ways a strong candidate for the job, was overlooked for the Kent captaincy in 1978. Derek Underwood says that Introduction 9 10 Peter Oborne, Basil D’Oliveira: Cricket and Conspiracy, the Untold Story , Little, Brown, 2004. 11 The exceptions were South Africans Stuart Leary and Sid O’Linn, and Australians Anthony Jose and Jack Pettiford. 12 He bowled 22 overs for 77 runs as, ironically, the Guyanan Roy Fredericks scored a century and won the match for the visitors.