Lives in Cricket No 10 - John Shepherd

the majority of the black community, working the land as tenants on their behalf, was impoverished. Conrad Hunte describes how his grandmother would hoe the weeds around the young sugar cane roots and carry the cane on her head at harvest time to fill the donkey carts. As a public servant John Shepherd’s father had a more secure and rather less arduous job than this – but there was little money to spare and life was often tough. It was a country life and a communal one, with neighbours sharing and bartering what they grew on their small patches of land – the Shepherds had such a patch on which sugar cane was grown and sold to provide a little extra income. The young John wanted for nothing – his mother was a good cook and the staple diet of breadfruit, rice, sweet potatoes and mangoes was healthy for a growing boy. John’s parents split up when he was still young and he and his sister eventually became part of a larger family when his mother remarried and had three children with her second husband, Mortley Hutson. One of John Shepherd’s half-brothers, Robert, was a good enough cricketer to play for Barbados youth – which suggests that the cricketing gene was maternal! As with most Barbadian families, religion played an important part in John’s early life: every Sunday they went to St Andrew’s Church together and as a child he attended Sunday school. Although John’s father was not a cricketer his grandfather 34 had been – a sufficiently good player to be selected for the ‘Railway’ team in the inter-war years – a rare achievement as Railway was mostly all white. Grandfather Shepherd was allegedly a magnificent hooker of the ball. John’s father was a very good marksman and represented Barbados at this sport – and he always supported his son’s soon-to-emerge ambitions as a cricketer. But the prime mover in the family was John’s mother who encouraged her son from the start – which was when he went to the St Andrew’s Church Boys’ School just down the road from his home. The village junior school had a small and basic pitch and boundaries were twos and fours not fours and sixes, but the young players were enthusiastic and inventive. As a boy of six or seven John would cut the branches from the coconut palms to make a rudimentary bat – and a ball would be fabricated from a stone or cork centre, wrapped in cloth, bound in twine and dipped in bitumen to hold it together. The stumps were carved from the branches of trees or made from driftwood – or sometimes empty bottles would have to suffice. The cricket pitch was any piece of waste ground or on the beach – for the rugged north-east coast of the island, with its long stretch of fine but weather-beaten beaches, is only a short ride from Belleplaine and on Sundays everyone went to the shore and played beach cricket. On Bank Holidays there would be excursions to Foul Bay on the south-east coast of the island where games would be a little more organised on its beautiful, wide, white beach. Belleplaine Boy 18 34 One of the most famous black professional cricketers in Barbados at the start of last century was William Shepherd, who played in fifteen first-class matches and umpired another eleven. Sadly no evidence exists that links John Shepherd to him!