Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

30 The line that disciplines the fell hour and a quarter the next morning. Sellers made Bowes work because he could take it, in this case bowling ‘with undiminished fire and pace in broiling hot sunshine’. Sellers also did it because so often it worked; Bowes took early wickets, of the best batsmen, before spinners went to work on the rest. Sellers might ask less of lesser bowlers. Without Bowes at Sheffield in June 1932, in his place Charles Hall took six for 71; who ‘owed a good deal of his effectiveness … to the careful way in which Sellers nursed him’, the Sheffield Telegraph reported. For most of the 1930s, Bowes was not a Yorkshire player, but a member of the MCC staff, as Lord’s signed him – on an extraordinarily long, nine- year contract. As Bowes and Verity were the only bowlers to feature among the leading three wicket-takers for Yorkshire every season from 1932 to 1939, Yorkshire did not seem that clever at spotting talent. What did Bowes make of it all – not being spotted at first, the hard work that always risked injury, the hoots from the crowd? At Hove in 1935, when he hit the Sussex captain A.J.Holmes (already injured) under the chin, the Sussex Daily News reporter approached Bowes in the pavilion afterwards; ‘he politely indicated that he had nothing to say’. For this sandy-haired man in spectacles who later became a journalist, not being allowed an opinion might have felt like one more injustice. Bowes could brood – ‘the Knight of the Mournful Countenance’, C.L.R.James once called him – but you might brood, if you had kept a diary on the Bodyline tour that a thoughtless teammate lost out of the window as the train home went through the Rockies. As for many men, even if the 1939-45 did not change him, life around him changed for him. Reviewing near the season’s end in August 1946, Kilburn called Bowes ‘a source of great comfort to his captain’. In August 1947 at Worcester, the local evening ’paper took Yorkshire’s picture before they took the field. Bowes was Sellers’ right-hand man. As so often in life, the measure of this man was how others missed him when he was gone. Hedley Verity Although a left-arm spin bowler, Verity had much in common with Bowes. Neither man came from quite a working-class or middle-class home: Bowes was the son of a goods foreman at a Leeds railway depot; Verity’s father was a Leeds coal merchant. Jardine praised Verity as observant. Few batsmen could do more than defend against him, and Sellers used that as long and often as he used Bowes. Worcestershire in June 1937 was typical; after Yorkshire made 460, Verity came on and whipped a ball across Eddie Douglas Jardine.