Lives in Cricket No 10 - John Shepherd

Chapter One Belleplaine Boy ‘ … to come out of the wilderness into bright stars and don’t get confused with the brightness, is a quality that does not exist with a lot of people’ Sir Everton Weekes on John Shepherd, January 2008 The pretty village of Belleplaine lies, as its name suggests, on a flat plain between two ranges of hills in the parish of St Andrew in the north-east of Barbados. St Andrew is famous for having the highest point on the island, Mount Hillaby at 1,116 feet, in its borders as well as the nearly 300-year-old Morgan Lewis sugar mill and the magnificent seventeenth-century St Andrew’s Church. It is farming country, mostly sugar cane, and even today it has a tranquil air – a long way from the bustle of busy Bridgetown, the island’s capital. As the crow flies Belleplaine is only 13 miles from the capital but today the journey takes over an hour along winding country roads and sixty years ago not every car on the island had quite the power to get over the hills at all. Belleplaine was once famous for being at the end of a railway line which ran from Bridgetown but the line closed in 1938. Today the village is off the tourist track except, perhaps, for the cricket pilgrim – for the Belleplaine area was the birthplace of three fine West Indian cricketers; Conrad Hunte, Keith Boyce and John Shepherd – and a few miles further north, in St Lucy, there was the home of that most lethal of fast bowlers Charlie Griffith. These were, in Griffith’s phrase, the ‘country boys from the north’ who had a special camaraderie as they progressed though the Barbadian cricketing ranks – fearsome Charlie never once bowled a bouncer at his near neighbour Shepherd! John Neil Shepherd was born on 9 November 1943 in a wooden house on the ‘Rectory Corner’ bend on the main road through the village, close to where the St Andrew’s rectory once stood, and opposite a fine mahogany tree which stands today. The Shepherd birthplace, though, has gone. Through the branches of the tree there is a glimpse of a sports ground – the home of Belleplaine Sports Club and, from 1948, of Belleplaine Cricket Club. John’s father, Ollie Vernon Shepherd, was a policeman and his mother, Kathleen Doughlin, was an accomplished seamstress, much in demand for her special skill as a maker of wedding dresses. In the 1940s life in Barbados for the majority of the population was not easy: infant mortality in the insanitary urban slums was the highest in the West Indies and the then colony had a feudal social structure little changed from Victorian times. In Belleplaine the land, as with all of rural Barbados, was owned by a small number of white or mixed-race (coloured) landlords and 17