Lives in Cricket No 10 - John Shepherd

cricketing prowess from his uncle, the England allrounder Phil Edmonds. Bogdanovski remembers 158 John Shepherd as being: … always very passionate about cricket … and I think he was always a little shocked how as schoolboys we took cricket as something we did from 3-5pm, a pastime, a bit of fun, it was always so much more to John … he struggled to comprehend the ambivalence of the average school boy towards cricket. He loved it – why didn’t we love it as much as he did? In one game … I remember sticking John back over his own head for a big six into the road. I was a slightly chippy character back then, and I didn’t have to work too hard to irritate many of the staff, most of whom would have been seething to have themselves despatched in this way. John on the other hand was just grinning at me! To him the incident was all about pride as a coach rather than any concern that it was his bowling that had been trounced. Perhaps also John was remembering the sixteen-year-old who had hit the ball out of the ground at Belleplaine Cricket Club back in 1959 and for whom cricket then as now was one of the great joys of life. John’s time at Eastbourne was to be happy not only because he was in a job that he loved and which had come to him at an ideal time in his life, but also because he met a lady, Susan Davies, with whom he was to form a close attachment and to whom he would be married in December 1999. The ‘father-giver’ at the wedding was the man who had brought John Shepherd to England thirty-five years earlier – now Lord Cowdrey of Tonbridge. 116 Third Innings John and Sue Shepherd at their wedding at Eastbourne College in December 1999. 158 E-mail to the author, December 2008.