Lives in Cricket No 10 - John Shepherd

Acknowledgements John Shepherd gave unstintingly of his time and without him this book would not have been possible. I am indebted to him and also to his wife Sue for their patience, kindness and hospitality. In Barbados, Mac D Smith showed me around St Andrew and John Shepherd’s birthplace of Belleplaine. Sir Everton Weekes talked to me at length about John as a schoolboy and club cricketer and about the prelude to Shep’s move to Kent in 1965 - I am immensely grateful to him for this and also for contributing the book’s foreword. Tony Cozier spoke to me about John’s Test career and about the implication in Barbados of his decision to play in Southern Africa. The C.L.R.James Cricket Research Centre Library at the University of the West Indies, in Cave Hill, was a useful source of reference. Kent County Cricket Club gave me access to Committee minutes and other documents and records and I am grateful to David Robertson for his help and advice. Many ex-cricketers spoke to me about John and I am particularly grateful to Derek Underwood and Mike Denness for allowing me to spend some time with them to tap their memories of Shep’s contribution to Kent’s glory years. In South Africa , Prof Andre Odendaal, now CEO of Western Province Cricket Association, spoke to me about John’s Southern Africa time and read and commented helpfully on a draft of Chapter Five of the book. The ACS has been supportive from the start – the editor David Jeater has been patient and helpful to a tyro biographer and Douglas Miller has been encouraging at all times and a wise counsel. I am grateful to them; to Peter Griffiths for the typesetting and his other contributions to the production process; to Philip Bailey for his statistical eagle eye; to Ric Finlay for help with John’s statistics while playing for Footscray; to Gerald Hudd for his proofreading; and to Roger Mann for contributing photographs from his collection. The MCC library and its staff have been a great help where my own books failed me. An early draft of the manuscript was read carefully by my wife Ann and by my good friends Nigel Lynch and David Marshall, all of whom corrected countless grammatical, punctuation and other errors which saved me embarrassment when I submitted a revised version to the editor. Paddy Briggs Teddington April, 2009 119