Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

14 Even in his playing days, Arthur gave time to the running of the game. He was a long-time county club committee man for Craven district; he attended the first meeting of the Yorkshire Cricket Council in Leeds in 1900. Just as his son followed that example, so Arthur was following his father, the founder of the family fortune. Robert Sellers was born in 1830 at Wyke, south of Bradford. He served an apprenticeship in a factory where his uncle was manager. Robert came to Keighley for the funeral of one of three Leeds men who had started a business in the town. Another of the three, William Darling, who had worked with Robert, persuaded him to become a partner of the firm in 1851. The men set up their tool- making works at Lawkholme, the part of town where the rugby league and cricket grounds still stand. Robert was, as one obituary put it in 1907, a ‘pioneer of industry’; ‘a man of fine presence and physique’, said another, ‘of considerable business acumen and tireless industry’. Factories made Keighley, as the stone buildings in the middle of town testify to this day, and the self-made factory owners such as Robert made money. He married a Keighley woman and had three daughters, then three sons. Like other amateur captains of his time, Walter Robins and Norman Yardley, Brian Sellers’ family could afford to send him to fee-paying schools and let him play cricket full-time for expenses only. Yet commoners were not far down their family trees. According to the 1871 census, when Arthur was ten months, also in the Sellers household was Arthur’s grandmother Mary, ‘formerly a laundress’. The famous Thomas Mann novel Buddenbrooks tells of three generations of a family; the energetic grandfather builds a business, the uninspired son merely manages it, and it falls when the grandson ignores it for the sake of art. The Sellers family was not like that. Everyone from Robert on threw themselves into civic life. Robert was a founder of Keighley’s chamber of commerce and a stalwart of the Liberal Club; besides cricket, Arthur was a committee member of Keighley Golf Club; a cousin of Brian’s founded a gliding club. Brian’s mother Mary – who coached him in the back garden, as his father was so often away playing cricket - was an ‘indefatigable charity and church worker’. All this took money. The golf club, that Brian was also a member of, in the 1920s cost three guineas to join besides the six guineas a year subscription; a month’s pay for some. Brian Sellers’ surviving son Andrew did not know how much advice Brian got from Arthur. From Brian Sellers’ reported after-dinner speeches – one more thing he followed his father in - we can tell that in at least some ways Brian took after his father. ‘Don’t pack a game in if you are getting old,’ Brian Sellers told an annual cricketing dinner in Bradford in September 1958. ‘The league and your own clubs have to be run. They have given you a lot of enjoyment so why not put something back into the game?’ Sellers offered also some of his philosophy, perhaps the nearest he went that night to a comment on the recent controversial sacking of Johnny Wardle. Enjoy whatever you do, he urged; and, surely, any differences can be sorted out: ‘That is the way I was brought up in this game. If you have got any grievance, get it off your chest and bear no malice.’ Sellers and son