Lives in Cricket No 10 - John Shepherd

The Rhodesia tour finished in September 1974 and Shepherd was looking for a winter job when Derrick Robins popped up again with an offer for him to join a tour party to the West Indies in October and November. Unsurprisingly this tour was controversial from the start and the planned schedule had to be changed when the governments of Guyana and of Trinidad refused the party entry because of their South African connections. But the tour (which involved no first-class matches) did go ahead, visiting Barbados, Grenada, St Lucia, St Vincent and some of the other small islands including Antigua. Lester Bird, the Prime Minister of Antigua, welcomed them and said that Robins by taking multi-racial teams to South Africa was contributing to the ‘breaking down of apartheid’: not a remark that played well throughout the Caribbean! In February 1975 Derrick Robins returned to South Africa, under Brian Close’s captaincy and Ken Barrington’s management, for the third successive year for an eight-match tour. Once again John Shepherd and Younis Ahmed were in the party which again mainly comprised English county professionals – one of them was Clive Radley who was Shepherd’s room-mate. The side won none of its five first-class matches, although Shep himself did well enough, scoring 233 runs at 46.60 and taking 14 wickets at 33.35. It seems that the close company of a minder that Shepherd had ‘enjoyed’ on his first visit no longer applied and that, although his status was nominally unchanged, life was more difficult. On one occasion Radley and his wife were travelling in a car with Radley driving, his wife in the middle of a bench seat and Shepherd on the outside – it was a bit cramped and Shep had his arm along the top of the seat to make more room. They were observed by an official-looking white man who wanted to know what was going on between the black Shepherd and the white lady next to him. 88 These incidents were few in number but cumulatively they had some effect on Shepherd who tended to spend more time in his room than on his previous South African tour. As had been the case in 1973 the opponents of the Robins XI were mostly all-white teams but they also played one match in Soweto against an ‘African XI’ and, as a token, two non-white players were included in a one-day President’s XI match against the tourists at Newlands. In September 1975 Shepherd was back in Rhodesia for another short, five-match ‘International Wanderers’ tour, this time under Glenn Turner’s captaincy. Shep played in two of the matches. Prior to the tour he had partnered Geoffrey Greenidge 89 in a double-wicket competition in Johannesburg – the two had formed a strictly unaccredited ‘West Indies’ team – and Greenidge had become the third West Indian, after Sobers and Honorary White 74 88 Mixed-race marriages were prohibited in 1949. Adulterous relationships between whites and non-whites were prohibited by the weirdly-titled Immorality Amendment Act of 1950. The latter was not to be repealed until 1985. 89 Geoffrey Greenidge was a white Barbadian whose participation in this tournament, and in one subsequent International Wanderers match in Salisbury, led to the Guyanese government cancelling a Shell Shield match with Barbados for which he had been selected.