Lives in Cricket No 10 - John Shepherd

then scoring a sparkling 30 – he was warmly applauded from every part of the ground as he returned to the pavilion. But for Shepherd the highlight of the tour was in the final match at the Wanderers ground in Johannesburg. The Robins eleven were in trouble at 167 for seven in their first innings when Shep came to the wicket. Then ‘mixing sheer hitting with copybook drives and glides [he] slammed 53 out of 60 while he was at the wicket. In just under an hour, he faced 51 balls and hit 5 fours and two magnificent, cross-batted sixes off Procter and Van der Bijl.’ 87 Shep had been cheered all the way to the wicket by the overwhelmingly white crowd of 15,000 who stood to applaud him – and he was cheered even more loudly on his return to the pavilion after his fine innings. Wisden called it a ‘glorious hour at the wicket’. He says today that it was the ‘biggest moment of my cricketing life – although I wish that it had happened at Canterbury, Bridgetown or Sabina Park’. John Shepherd’s experiences throughout this tour were, to say the least, very strange for he felt ‘100% African’ as a black South African had so warmly addressed him – before going on to say ‘ ... I’ve never met a black Shepherd before. Did you leave your sheep on the pastures of Kent?’ In the elite Rand International Hotel in Johannesburg Shepherd went to the kitchens to talk to the staff to try to find out what life was like for them – and he found out that it was pretty horrible. It was no fun to be a black man or woman in John Vorster’s racially divided Republic. Shep was the most popular member of the team – waiters had never seen a black man in the dining-room so he got double helpings of steak for breakfast! But the ambivalence of his presence and the uncomfortable likelihood that some in the black community regarded him as a traitor, or at least as an Uncle Tom, came home to him when he visited a non-white, mainly Indian, cricket match in Durban on his own initiative on his day off. At this match he met Pat Naidoo who was legal advisor to the South African Cricket Board of Control, the then governing body for black cricket and strong opponents of any cricket tours from abroad. Shepherd was shocked when Naidoo, who had initially seemed friendly, introduced him to his two sons as ‘the man who would rather play with the whites than come and play with us’. Shepherd was to see Naidoo again on future visits and he still regrets that an apology was never forthcoming from him. John Shepherd’s next visit to southern Africa was in September 1974 when he was part of an ‘International Wanderers’ tour to Rhodesia which also included one match in Johannesburg. This international team, as ever under Brian Close’s captaincy, was predominantly English but also included, for some games, the South Africans Eddie Barlow, Peter Carlstein, Graeme Pollock and Barry Richards, the Pakistani Younis Ahmed, the Australians Ian Chappell and Garth McKenzie and the New Zealander Glenn Turner. The organisers congratulated themselves that they had a representative of every Test nation in the party – other than India. It was a provocative visit, although perhaps not intended to be so – and it was not Honorary White 72 87 Johannesburg Star , 24 November 1973.