Ralph Gosein was one of the Caribbean's leading umpires for more than a decade until the late 1970s. He took up officiating when he got a job alongside Eric Lee Kow, at the time a Test umpire. Gosein was a keen cricket follower, and Kow encouraged him to attend umpiring courses and he quickly qualified. On his first-class debut in 1953-54 he stood with Kow, and in 1964-65 he made his Test debut in a match involving Australia at the Queen's Park Oval. "When I got to the ground and saw the amount of people, I nearly turned back for home," he later recalled. "Talk about butterflies...Huh...they just keep fluttering around my stomach." Until his retirement in 1980 he stood in 25 Tests.
Martin Williamson