Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

17 joked how Sellers was known as Midge while a boy at St Peter’s, ‘but talking expanded him, and he grew to six feet’. Few men were so merry in print about Sellers. While Sellers, then, did not have quite the elite finishing of Yardley, he had more spent on him than others in his wider family. Herbert Sellers – the cousin who founded the gliding club, who died at 29 in 1933 – went to the boys’ grammar school in Keighley. Arthur Sellers sent his son to boarding school, whether out of ambition, or because it simply suited the father to have the boy off his hands most of the time. Likewise, thanks to the war, then going to prep and public school, and service in the Army, Andrew Sellers only started to get to know his father after the age of 20. His brother David was a cricketer – ‘I think he played for the Yorkshire colts once or twice’ – but Andrew was never really interested, ‘mainly I think because he wasn’t there to bowl a ball on the lawn or things like that. It never entered my life.’ In the seven seasons from 1925, when Brian Sellers began playing for Keighley’s first team, until 1932, when Yorkshire called, he became steadily more successful without standing out as his father did. Looking back, we can see that playing for Keighley – usually on a Saturday and bank holidays, in the Bradford League – did prepare Sellers for his later years. For example, crowds were sometimes of county size, and certainly large by later standards. In June 1925, aged 18, Sellers was batting at five in front of 3000 spectators. A month later, when visitors Queensbury made 230 for seven, Keighley with two hours to bat seemed to have little chance Sellers and son North Street, where Brian Sellers grew up. The villa has recently been a retirement home and by 2015 was empty.