Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

137 Keighley, December 2015 and as in any group, by swearing they were as much keeping others out, if they conformed to society by speaking politely outside the dressing room and in print. Just as Freemasonry insists on keeping its words and phrases to itself, so swearing was a secret among sportsmen. That can explain Sellers’ swearing when playing. What was his excuse as the committee chairman? Trueman was perceptive: “He would curse and swear like a trooper, and you could believe, if you were terribly misguided, that he was ‘one of the boys’.” Whether by Trueman’s time Sellers swore out of habit, or by choice, swear words coarsened conversation; by forcing the hearer to listen, Sellers was making everyone else accept his right to swear at them. As Illingworth told it, after he sent in his letter of resignation, Bill Bowes told him that Sellers had said Illingworth could go, ‘and any bugger else that wants to can go with you’. In an age, tellingly, of ever more freedom to swear – or put another way, those that like to swear are forcing the rest of us to live with it – we might not be able to judge how bad a swear-word ‘bugger’ was in Yorkshire in 1968. As always, it depended on time and place and audience. While according to Boycott, in this case Sellers said ‘fuck’ rather than ‘bugger’, both could be right; Sellers might have used either in different conversations. If Bowes or Illingworth had swapped the then unprintable ‘fuck’ for the more tolerable and, in Yorkshire, even endearing ‘bugger’, we can see that like any taboo, swearing required the victim to share the guilt of the secret. As in sexual abuse, that the innocent could not easily admit that they were sworn at was part of the hold that the swearer had over them. The players could not swear back. Sellers ‘called spades bloody shovels’, John Hampshire recalled: ‘His language was that of a navvy to his work- mate, labouring on a building site, but his attitude was that of the NCO to the humblest private.’ In that one sentence, Hampshire pointed at how professional sport was an occupation like any other; and its connection with the military. Swearing came easily; it could put a man down; it was a sign of harsh man-management - ‘hardly a silken art form in Yorkshire’, Boycott recalled later. To swear at a man denied him compassion. However, in professional sport, that did serve a purpose. As Basil D’Oliveria said - a useful 1960s source as an incomer to English cricket – ‘nice chaps win nothing’. Here was a social paradox; Yorkshire were as D’Oliveria saw ‘the aristocrats of the game’. They would do anything to win, short of cheating. Being brutish rather than ‘nice’ was a choice; a necessary hallmark of winners, even. Stuart Surridge, Surrey’s winning captain of the 1950s, said that he learned this lesson from Sellers: ‘He told me you get nothing for coming second.’ Willie Watson, who gave more of his autobiography over to Sellers than most, did not say Sellers swore, while making plain that Sellers meant his words to hurt: ‘If you received the lash of the skipper’s tongue on the field you felt about the size of a midget.’ Despite summing up Sellers – twice – with a cliché, ‘strict disciplinarian’ (is there any other sort?!), Watson did get across how everything Sellers did was for a purpose: Off the field he was a cheerful character who liked a joke and who liked a