Illustration by Duncan Lloyd

Take a look at the ageing photos on the walls of cricket clubhouses across the north of England and there’s a fair chance that amongst the smiling faces you’ll see that of a benign, bespectacled Barbadian with the pleasingly lyrical name of Cyril Clairmonte Depeiza.

I first came across a picture of Depeiza at Horden Colliery Welfare Ground in County Durham several summers ago. The man his team mates knew simply as CC or Dee had played for Horden back in the early 1970s, endearing himself to the club by arranging a social fixture against Manchester’s West Indian Sports Club that turned into one of the greatest parties the pit village has ever known.

As to how Clairmonte Depeiza, a West Indian test cricketer, came to be in Horden in the first place is a singular story of sporting migration.

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Read the full version in The Northern Correspondent #4