Lives in Cricket No 10 - John Shepherd

‘international’ match had not been played when John started his career – over 560 had taken place by the time he retired from the game. In his first Championship season with Kent Shepherd played in one match with the 46-year-old Godfrey Evans, who had started his career in 1939: in his last seasons, with Gloucestershire, Shepherd played with the young Jack Russell, who did not retire from the game until 2004 – a cricket line of nearly seventy years. Bob Willis described cricket in the 1970s as a time of ‘Cricket Revolution’ and Christopher Martin-Jenkins defined the period from 1963 to 1983 more prosaically as ‘Cricket’s Years of Change’ – but, whether we see the arrival of Packer in 1977 and the explosion of one-day cricket which followed this as revolutionary or evolutionary, what is clear is that cricket would never be the same again. Sometimes John Shepherd was just a professional caught up in change: sometimes, as with Packer, he was a bystander (although he was close to the action as his Kent colleagues, Knott, Underwood and Woolmer were three of the six England players who committed early to Packer in 1977). And for a time, when he was one of only two non-white members of private cricket tours in South Africa between 1973 and 1976, he was uncomfortably in the spotlight. While Shepherd’s career years saw the game of cricket change beyond recognition, the same can be said for changes in the wider world that impinged upon his choice of career and his life. In the year of John’s birth, 1943, the great West Indian Test cricketer Learie Constantine was overtly discriminated against at a London hotel and later successfully brought a civil action against the hotel for breach of contract and racial discrimination. But the ‘Colour Bar’ that he described in his 1954 book of that name did not suddenly go away in Britain and, as we shall see, it was also alive and ‘well’ in the Barbados in which John Shepherd was to grow up. Constantine said that ‘Cricket in the West Indies is the most glaring example of the black man being kept in his place’ and Jamaican Prime Minister and West Indies cricket historian, Michael Manley, wrote that Barbados had a ‘class structure more rigid and more sternly reflective of colour barriers than any other Caribbean territory’. 5 The racial and social divide in Barbados was particularly reflected in the club cricket world, where there was segregation on class and racial lines between the Barbados Cricket Association (BCA), which was under the management of the white ‘planter-merchant’ wealthy elite, and the Barbados Cricket League (BCL) which was predominantly black and poor. The BCA included clubs such as Wanderers and its bitter rival Pickwick which had been founded on racial grounds and remained selective on the grounds of colour until such discrimination was prohibited by law after 1957. This divide also extended to selection for the national team – Garry Sobers has written that ‘ … in Barbados in the forties and early fifties, a coloured player had to be three times as good as a white player to play for the island’. 6 Very gradually, as independence approached and as the power Introduction 7 5 Michael Manley, A History of West Indies Cricket , Andre Deutsch, 1988. 6 Garry Sobers, My Autobiography , Headline, 2002.