Lives in Cricket No 10 - John Shepherd

Shepherd today says the same. He was a professional and his main motivation was, like Younis Ahmed’s, to secure remunerative winter employment – his attitude was ‘Have bat, will travel’. It was a job and he had a family to look after and a mortgage to pay – and times were difficult, with inflation high and rising in response to massive increase in oil prices and the British economy tottering – a three-day week was shortly to be introduced by the Heath Government. His only real concern was to be assured that his decision to go on the tour would not affect his rights as a Barbadian citizen to return to his home country – not necessarily to play cricket there but just to visit. In both Younis’ and Shepherd’s cases the choice they made meant that they virtually ended their international careers – although Younis did play for Pakistan thirteen years later, having served a ban imposed by the Pakistan Cricket Board. Shepherd was to have no such luck – although, as we have seen, he had in any case been informed that his international career was over a couple of years before he chose to go on the D.H.Robins tour. Indeed Shepherd’s decision to go to South Africa was at least in part influenced by what he saw as his rejection by the West Indies. Shepherd was never quite banned by the West Indies, although he was certainly criticised, even lambasted, by some for the choice that he made. At the beginning of the 1974 county season his Kent colleague and fellow West Indian Bernard Julien, who had been on the 1973 England tour and had also played against England in their 1973/74 visit to the Caribbean, told him that the West Indies captain Rohan Kanhai, when he had heard about Shepherd’s decision, had said ‘They should ban the black bastard’. Kanhai was to go to South Africa himself later that very year when he played four matches for Transvaal in the Dadabhai Trophy in the 1974/75 season, and within a few years a number of other West Indians were to follow the path that he and John Shepherd had trodden! Undoubtedly both Younis and Shepherd were being used by the South African cricket authorities, and by Robins, to give a multi-racial veneer to the tour and to lay the trail for what they hoped would be press reports that, in cricket at least, progress was being made towards the breaking down of racial barriers in South African society. This was all part of South African cricket’s rather disingenuous PR campaign to try and persuade that a process of normalisation was under way in cricket if not elsewhere. Crawford White’s Daily Express article at the end of the Robins tour and stories about the removal of ‘petty apartheid’ laws in other right-of-centre British newspapers like the Daily Mail ’s ‘Apartheid law takes a big knock’ and the Daily Telegraph ’s ‘Whites only signs are taken down’, in February 1974, were part of this campaign. At the same time, whilst the Robins tours were certainly unofficial, there was at least a tacit acceptance of them by the English cricket establishment. It has been noted that the minute books of the Cricket Council, the governing body of English cricket, ‘… do not indicate that it tried to discourage the Robins’ tours’ 83 and no doubt Robins 70 Honorary White 83 Jack Williams, Cricket and Race , Berg, 2001.