The Accrington team clearly saw their own pro as a protector as well as a friend. He’d occasionally head off by car to Manchester’s Moss Side of a Saturday night for West Indian food – rice, pork and peas – at a friend’s house. He was married in Liverpool, to Shurla, who he met in Bridgetown and who followed him to England as a student. But he’d never be away too long. He was embedded in the life of this town.
The only point of mild contention is whether this West Indian ever bowled short at amateurs.
‘I was petrified - scared – of hitting amateurs,’ he says after the supper. There were no helmets, you must remember that.’
But there’s a dissenting voice in the room. It belongs to the diminutive Edward Slinger, an Enfield opener known as 'The Judge' by dint of his distinguished career in the law, who certainly felt some of those balls to be short. Sir Wes grins. ‘But you were 5ft 5!’ he says. The room dissolves into laughter, before one of the spontaneous rounds of applause which punctuate the evening.
More than anything they are responding to this individual’s humility, kindness and self-effacement: qualities which are now hard to locate amid the self-importance, vanity and bombast of elite sport. Here is an individual who self-evidently considers himself no better than anyone. And one who wants to share his views on conduct in the arena, fiercely competitive though his cricket encounters always were.
‘This business about sledging,’ he says, in relation to the forthcoming Ashes series. ‘I tell you what - it depends how fast the bowler bowls. I’ve never been sledged by an Australian.’
The ensuing Q and A reveals that every detail of his three years here has been preserved in Accrington’s collective memory. How he temporarily lost his gold cross, one Saturday. (At Lowerhouse, on the fringes of Burnley, seven miles away, he is reminded.) ‘I still have it,’ Sir Wes replies, reaching beneath his shirt. He can describe the individual who set off on to the square to look for it.