Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

16 Sellers and son Thanks to Robert, the Sellers family could bring up their children in comfort. Brian was born in March 1907 and had an elder brother, Godfrey. According to the 1911 census, Arthur and Mary Sellers, and their two sons, lived in an eight-roomed house with two servants; Robert in the 1871 and 1891 censuses only had one servant. More subtle was Arthur’s name and influence that gave Brian a start, ahead of others – unspoken and unwritten, or taken for granted, as such things usually are. That said, to make his way in cricket he had to work the same as anyone else. ‘It’s a poor do that a lad like me at 48 can throw a cricket ball further than these youngsters. There is not sufficient practice,’ he told that 1956 dinner. Brian Sellers makes an interesting comparison with Norman Yardley, who captained Yorkshire after Sellers from 1948. The men went to the same school, St Peter’s, in York; Yardley was eight years younger. In his 1949 memoir Cricket Campaigns , while he was captain of England, Yardley recalled playing for his school’s first eleven against ‘the Craven Gentlemen’, captained by Sellers, ‘who scored a century in beautiful style’, probably in July 1930. Although Yardley wrote of then envying the older man, Sellers only became a Yorkshire player (and captain) at 25, whereas Yardley was capped by Yorkshire at 22 and was playing for England on tour at 23. Yardley rose early, like Arthur Sellers; and went further. From St Peter’s Yardley went to Cambridge University; unlike Sellers. It made Yardley one of the few Yorkshiremen who could stand their own, socially and in cricket terms, with Sellers, and it showed in his memoir. Yardley Arthur Sellers.