Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

136 Keighley, December 2015 when his voice boomed again, ‘Hey, coom back, coom back. Listen lad, I want to tell you something. If you’re not playing for England and on the boat to Australia there’ll be only one person to blame. You’ll be to blame. It’ll be your fault and nobody else’s.’ I was many miles down the A1 before I realised this was a back-handed compliment. We know Cowdrey was on the threshold of a long and fine career; he did not, and Cowdrey was evidently unsure enough of himself to dwell on Sellers’ ‘shattering’ opinion. Did Sellers, the man of dramatic entries, also enjoy the impression he made on the young and well-spoken? Another Oxbridge man and future England captain, Tony Lewis, recalled in his 2003 memoir the shock of his first handshake with Sellers, and his words: ‘Na then, you little Welsh bastard.’ As with Australians, ‘bastards’ was not meant nastily. In his earlier, 1985 memoir Lewis recalled Sellers, ‘of the severe countenance and intimidating reputation’ usually greeting Lewis to Scarborough with: ‘Na then y’Welsh bastard. What do you make of this bluddy lot then?’ Sellers made a habit of it. Brian Dolphin of Sutton-in-Craven recalled Sellers captained a team in an invitation match at Beckwithshaw near Harrogate around 1960. The Bedser twins were umpires. Sellers ‘was sat on a seat with some ladies’ when the Bedsers arrived ‘and Brian said, ‘now then you Surrey b****s. How are you?’’ And when Sellers had run out one of his own players, Sellers told him: ‘You run as if you have a bat up your arse!’ As Brian Dolphin added: ‘He could be quite crude!’ As elsewhere with Sellers, some skirted over his swearing. Hutton for instance in old age called it ‘straight talking’. Bryan Stott recalled that Sellers would swear at dinners, ‘even if the bishop was there’, or ladies: ‘If he was giving grace, I won’t tell you what he used to say for grace, it was unnecessary.’ Though most would not embarrass themselves by repeating Sellers’ swear-words, we need to confront it. This very hiding of a part of Sellers should make us more curious. We should also confront our own prejudices, and not assume that only the working-class swear, because common people are coarse; when in fact some common people do not swear and do not like to hear it, and our supposed betters, leaders in politics and business, and the most sensitive artists, can and do swear. Otherwise Sellers – as one of cricket’s elite, privately-educated, who yet spoke with a northern accent and swore so readily – will confuse us. Some swear because their work is harsh; soldiers, sailors, the police, miners, labourers and criminals. Cricketers, who played to win, had to live with defeat - perhaps often - and face their own failure. Swearing might serve as an accepted way of releasing personal and group pain, even by those who would not swear otherwise. Dickie Bird said ‘language’ (another word to hide swearing) ‘couldn’t be worse than that used in the Yorkshire team in my early days’, in the late 1950s. Players by swearing acknowledged the violence of sporting competition, team against team and by every man for a place in a team. By swearing, men shared a culture;