Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

149 the 19 th century from a talk at that BSSH conference by Jeremy Lonsdale. For Sellers’ years as captain: the Yorkshire Post in Leeds central library, and the Sheffield Daily Telegraph in Sheffield central library. For the Yorkshire Evening Post : Doncaster library. The Newcastle Morning Herald (in Australia) also carried Sellers’ 1946/47 Test reports, which you can read online at trove.nla.gov.au . Just as for my Victory book I enjoyed hunting newspaper reports in the towns the Australians played in, so I followed Sellers’ team around the country to read old evening newspapers: at The Hive, Worcester; Oxfordshire History Centre, Oxford; Cambridge central library; Nottingham central library; Derby local studies library, and the Magic Attic, Swadlincote; Birmingham central library; Leicestershire record office; and Northampton library. For London evening, and national ’papers, I used the British Library at St Pancras; the Manchester Guardian , The Observer and The Times I could read online as a member of Manchester library. For Sellers at St Peter’s School: The Yorkshire Herald , York library; and The Peterite , the school magazine, that you can read on the school’s website, above all the 1923 and 1924 issues. The 1981 issue reprinted the Yorkshire Post obituary of Sellers by Kilburn. Through appeals in Yorkshire newspapers I was glad to hear from several people, notably Sellers’ daughter-in-law Anne. I thank also Stephen Chalke, for putting me on to Ron Deaton, who put me on to Andrew Sellers and Bryan Stott; David Moore, for his hospitality and letting me go through his volumes of The Cricketer ; Neil Robinson in the library at Lord’s for letting me see MCC papers; Peter Wynne-Thomas, librarian at Trent Bridge; and the Library and Museum of Freemasonry in Great Queen Street, London, free and well worth a visit, even for non- masons. I should add I have never been a Freemason nor ever wanted to be one. I went through various Yorkshire club committee minutes at West Yorkshire council archives at Morley, file Wyl 2053; including an important memoir of Sellers by Ted Lester, in White Rose magazine, February 1990, which Ron Deaton told me about. Thanks also to Ron for a close read of this text; and for some of the 1930s and 1940s photographs. Others are from Roger Mann and William Roberts. Dr Neil Carter of De Montfort University let me give a paper on Sellers on 29 January 2016, during my master’s degree in sports history and culture; and Prof Dil Porter gave me the tip afterwards that the cricketing controversy between Sellers and Hammond in Australia in 1946 may have been personal. The website cricketarchive.com was as ever useful for match and player records; my thanks to its then organiser Peter Griffiths; and to Mick Pope, for confirming to me at the March 2015 annual meeting of the Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians in Derby that Sellers did not have a biographer. For details of sources by chapter, see online at markrowe. wordpress.com. The title of chapter three comes from the early Auden poem Missing ; that and In Memory of WB Yeats are in his Collected Shorter Thanks and Sources