Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

117 the first eleven. Illingworth had made the Yorkshire first team in his teens; sooner than Verity and Wilfred Rhodes. Sellers as chairman had to think of the club’s future, and the interests of future Illingworths. In his third and final Daily Mail article, Wardle had complained of a ‘terrible feeling of uncertainty hanging over so many’ Yorkshire players; men released with years of good cricket in them (Wardle named Watson; he hardly needed to add himself); and young uncapped players wondering if they were better off elsewhere (Doug Padgett, for example). Yet by 1962 Padgett was capped, and had played for England. From a critic’s perspective, Sellers was playing on everyone’s loyalty to Yorkshire, keeping the workers down, ‘treating players as if they were made of wood’, in Wardle’s vivid phrase. Stott was in the field, at Bristol, when captain Vic Wilson went off to take the news of which two capped players Yorkshire would not keep for next season: ‘It was a horrible way of doing business.’ That was only how employers in the mills, factories and farms treated their men. Workers at Sellers’ printing works remembered it fondly enough. Steve Troth, a teenage apprentice there in the early 1970s, called it ‘old school’; workers called the Sellers family directors ‘Mr Brian’, ‘Mr Godfrey’, ‘Mr David’ and ‘Mr Andrew’. Players resisted Sellers’ enforcement of what could look like cosmetic, unnecessary standards. In old age, Trueman recalled how an electric shaver company offered him £1000 (a year’s pay for a workman in the 1960s) to grow a beard, that they would shave off. Sellers ‘went mad’: ‘You can get that lot shaved off straight away. You haven’t asked permission to grow a beard, so get it off. We want no seafaring buggers in here.’ What was the problem; would Trueman bowl any less fast, bearded?! Sellers could hardly object to whiskers (after all, W.G.Grace had a beard; Lord Hawke had a moustache) but did mind the sign of independent thinking in Trueman; by this time someone setting an example to juniors. Sellers, as the voice of the club, did not sound open to granting permission for beards; he was demanding a uniform look. A beard – or rather, some men choosing beards, some not – was an offence against team unity, or rather the (as important) appearance of it. Time-keeping, too, was obvious to enforce. In July 1962 Trueman notoriously over-slept and arrived late at the Taunton ground; captain Vic Wilson sent him home. Leaving aside who and what to believe – Trueman was an over-worked and tired victim (Trueman) or a law to himself (others) - Trueman had to drive to Yorkshire to apologise to Sellers and his committee. The club, literally, would not meet its leading player halfway. Sportsmen were not precious and powerful yet. If the Close affair of 1967 showed anything, it was that Yorkshire were no harsher employers than the MCC. Briefly, Close became captain of England in the summer of 1966. At Edgbaston on 18 August 1967, Warwickshire ended a Championship match on 133 for five, nine short of victory. Yorkshire had bowled 24 overs in 98 minutes – in fact a faster rate than the 16 overs an hour that England had bowled in the most recent Test match. Warwickshire spectators however had taken offence; and John Woodock in the Times accused Yorkshire of ‘all the known methods of wasting time’, such as ‘endless consultations’ and walking slowly between The Sixties