Lives in Cricket No 10 - John Shepherd

South African teams, they were a tragic justification. Barely believably, however, the New Zealand rugby authorities pressed ahead with an All Blacks tour in South Africa which began only a couple of weeks after Soweto. This decision led to the boycotting of the Montreal Olympic Games in July by African nations and a year later to the signing of the Gleneagles Agreement which was unanimously approved by Commonwealth presidents and prime ministers, who agreed, as part of their support for the international campaign against apartheid, to ‘discourage contact and competition between their sportsmen and sporting organisations, teams or individuals from South Africa’. In South Africa this tightening of bans against sporting contacts was received with dismay by the cricketing authorities who claimed, with some justification, that whilst the state remained an apartheid state, in cricket real progress towards racial integration was being made. There were many, as we have seen, in the world of cricket outside the Republic who agreed with them. But for John Shepherd there was some relief that the unequivocal statement of the West Indies Board in May and the subsequent Gleneagles agreement made his own position clear – what had been a difficult personal period was now over. He genuinely believed that he should be free to pursue his profession so long as he was within the law and that, as he said at the time, ‘I made a contribution to cricket and good race relations … I have perhaps changed a few narrow views and helped people realise that there is nothing abnormal about playing and mixing with a black person.’ 100 His views were echoed in a letter sent by the Chairman of the Bulawayo Sports Club, Mr D.K.Naik, to the West Indian Cricket Board of Control on 29 June 1976. ‘Players like John Shepherd,’ wrote Mr Naik, ‘ … have done a great deal for cricket in South Africa for its own sake as well as to break the immoral discriminatory practices in sport here.’ This is not quite the end of the John Shepherd and South Africa story. The Gleneagles Agreement remained honoured for the rest of the decade and not even Derrick Robins or Richie Benaud were in a position to organise private tours to the republic. But in 1981 the New Zealand rugby authorities invited the South African team to tour New Zealand and, despite protests, the tour went ahead – it was the first ‘official’ sporting contact between South Africa and the outside world for five years. Perhaps emboldened by this, very secret planning was under way for an unofficial ‘England’ cricket tour of South Africa to take place in March 1982. In the event the South African Breweries’ English XI arrived in the Republic and played eight matches – it was the first ‘rebel’ tour. The team was captained by Graham Gooch and included John Shepherd’s erstwhile Kent colleagues Alan Knott, Derek Underwood and Bob Woolmer. They were handsomely 80 Honorary White 100 Quoted by Andre Odendaal in Cricket in Isolation , published by its author, 1977.