Lives in Cricket No 10 - John Shepherd

Chapter Five Honorary White Hindsight is a wonderful thing. With hindsight we can see that the isolation of apartheid South Africa in the 1980s and 1990s did the trick – it helped bring that wretched regime founded on ignorance, stupidity and selfishness to heel. With that hindsight we can also see that Wisden was on the wrong side for much of the period. It believed that visiting cricketers, repositories of enlightenment, (sic), could bring illumination to that benighted land. Phooey! Wisden’s line – with that blessed hindsight – was misconceived. Apartheid in South Africa couldn’t be tempered; it had to be dismantled. Stephen Moss (editor), Wisden Anthology: 1978-2006 As we have seen in Chapter Two, the ‘D’Oliveira affair’ of 1968 had divided the world of cricket. John Shepherd’s Kent captain, Colin Cowdrey, and the putative manager of the cancelled 1968/69 South African tour, Kent’s Les Ames, had tried to keep that tour on track and they had also been supporters of the 1970 South African visit to England. Cowdrey was one of the many well-known figures who supported an appeal to set up a fund, ‘The 1970 Cricket Fund’, intended to pay for police protection at 1970 tour matches. The fund had wide support including, significantly as it turned out later, that of the chairman of Coventry City FC, Derrick Robins. It is true to say that the overwhelming majority of cricketers, cricket administrators and cricket followers were opposed to the isolation of South Africa in sport. 71 For example a Special General Meeting of Kent County Cricket Club was held at the request of a member who moved that no players in the Kent squad take part in any fixtures against the 1970 South African tourists, but this was defeated by a ‘large majority’. Whilst the cricket ‘establishment’ wanted to keep South Africa in the fold, even at a time when there had been little or no progress towards multi-racial cricket in that then benighted country, the wider opposition to the tour in Britain was strong – opposition which included some cricket notables like the broadcaster John Arlott, former Test cricketer the Reverend David Sheppard and the 26-year-old Mike Brearley. Amongst the tour’s most vocal opponents in the world of cricket outside England had, unsurprisingly, been the West Indians whose Cricket Board had formally said that if the tour went ahead it would do 65 71 Supporters of the fund included Brian Close, Jack Bannister, Alec Bedser, the Duke of Norfolk, Rachel Heyhoe, and Tony Lewis; see Jack Williams, Cricket and Race , Berg, 2001.