When Tony Cozier died in hospital in his native Barbados, the voice of West Indian cricket – and its conscience - was silenced.

Cozier was the radio commentator who told the world about the reign of West Indies as the world champions from the late 1970s until the early 1990s.

He was also the reporter who chronicled their decline in the same measured tones of objectivity and fairness.

But, bravest of all, he was the conscience too. Right up to his death he gave the West Indian board hell for squandering the money and legacy that it had inherited.

To the surprise of many who knew him only from the radio with his Bajan lilt, Cozier was a white Barbadian, descended from the Scottish labourers who emigrated to the island in the seventeenth century and who worked the sugar plantations of the east coast where the tradewinds blow their balmy breezes.