Lives in Cricket No 10 - John Shepherd

abomination of apartheid would be an affront, notwithstanding the fact that the cricketing authorities had created small islands of multiracial integration in a country that was otherwise overwhelmingly, and constitutionally, divided on racial grounds. As Peter Hain put it, ‘Sport can no more be considered in isolation from the society in which it occurs, than can other human activities.’ 79 By 1973 those who supported continuing sporting ties had to bow to the inevitable, at least as far as official tours to the Republic of South Africa were concerned. But the maverick businessman and sports enthusiast Derrick Harold Robins thought otherwise and he had the money to put his thoughts into practice. Robins was a wicket-keeper who had played two first-class matches for Warwickshire in 1947, and then became a successful businessman and patron of the game. His business success with Banbury Buildings had allowed him to indulge his sporting passions both in football as chairman of Coventry City and in cricket where he was the organiser of the Eastbourne Festival. In 1969 his team, D.H.Robins’ XI, played the opening first-class match against the West Indian tourists at Eastbourne with the 54-year-old Robins as captain of a side containing eight Test players. John Shepherd, in his first match as a member of a West Indies tour party, was in the West Indies team for that match. Shepherd recalls Robins as being cricket-mad, proud, with a giant-sized ego and a rather a steam-rolling approach when any obstacles came in his way! After South Africa’s exclusion from official international cricket post-1970, the South African administrator Jack Cheetham asked Robins if he would organise a private tour to South Africa to take place in early 1973 and Robins agreed. The all-white tour party was captained by David Brown and included other England Test players in John Murray, Robin Hobbs, John Hampshire and Bob Willis, as well as experienced county players like Clive Radley, Roger Knight, Frank Hayes and John Lever. The team was a strong one and they were surprised how fervently competitive the cricket was – notwithstanding that the visitors were part of a private and very unofficial tour. In the final first-class match of the tour there were 17,000 spectators at the Wanderers in Johannesburg for the Saturday of the unofficial ‘Test’. As Bob Willis put it, ‘The South Africans were very disappointed at being ostracised from Test cricket … they were very keen to show that they were still a force to be reckoned with’. 80 On the pitch they certainly did that – winning the ‘Test’ by an innings with a Barry Richards century and major contributions from Eddie Barlow and Mike Procter with the ball. On 27 September 1973 the news broke that the party for Derrick Robins’ next tour of South Africa, scheduled for October to December of that year, would include the Pakistani Younis Ahmed and Kent’s John Shepherd. At a dinner in Cape Town the South African Minister of Sport, Piet Koornhof, Honorary White 68 79 Peter Hain, Don’t Play with Apartheid , George Allen and Unwin, 1971. 80 Bob Willis, The Cricket Revolution , Sidgwick and Jackson 1981.