Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

146 in 1976, when it was too late for everyone. As revealing were Trueman’s brave words in 1961; brave, because they came out while Sellers ruled: ‘Unlike some of the blokes I have never been scared by Mr Sellers because I know him to be straightforward and sincere in everything he does. He might give you a reight rollocking but he will finish by shaking hands – there is no malice borne – and you can go off and sup a gill together as if nothing has been said.’ Let us leave them there. * We leave them there; that is not quite where we end. In his great poem in memory of Yeats, Auden wrote that Yeats ‘became his admirers’. What did Sellers become? Most of us after our physical death live on in our children; in stories told; and in such intangible things as the example we set, and our reputation. As MCC head coach in the 1980s, Don Wilson insisted on a dress code of blazer and tie, ‘even on the hottest days’; a legacy of Sellers, who had insisted on the same of his players at the lunch table. Perhaps while Andrew Sellers lives, Brian Sellers does not die: ‘Where he went he liked to make a stir, I have got a bit of that character; I like to get things going, be rude to everybody, sort of take what I am given and give back, to which everybody says, oh, you are just like your bloody father.’ Andrew Sellers in old age was still hearing stories from strangers: ‘I don’t know half the stuff that went on. When he was at home he was a family man and he wasn’t a great lover of the press of course. He kept the family side – we very rarely, apart from various cricketers coming to stay or have meals with us, we really would not have known that cricket was involved, which is the way he wanted it, and that was the way it was.’ Many have never heard of Brian Sellers, ‘but that would not have bothered him in Sellers’ final home at Southway, Eldwick. Keighley, December 2015