Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

33 English and Australian cricketers alike observed that Hutton’s upbringing in ‘the hard Yorkshire school’ moulded the man as the first professional captain of England, though not his county. As Trevor Bailey put it, Hutton learned to give ‘nowt’ and to expect ‘nowt’. As important as how his team treated others was how the team got on among itself. Hutton in old age recalled how the captain as an amateur dressed in a different room. Hutton believed this physical distance helped, as it gave the professionals freedom to talk: ‘… if the captain had been present, those views would have been bottled up or, if aired, provoked bad feeling’. That implied players sometimes spoke ill of Sellers, even if only in the heat of a moment. Hutton did recall good advice from him. On 25 July 1934 at Worcester, Hutton needed a morale-boosting innings after an unsuccessful month as opener: ‘Sellers told me to go in and play my own game.’ Hutton made 196, his highest score of his first three seasons. Sellers, then, mattered to all four of these men, although as players they each achieved more than him. The four had one thing in common that they did not share with Sellers. They were Freemasons. Freemasonry Bradman, Hammond, Ranji and Colin Cowdrey, to name only a few famous cricketers, were Freemasons. Of all the words written about them, you would expect something about that fact, even if membership were unimportant to them. Ignorance is no longer any excuse, as it’s been no secret since 2012, when the Library and Museum of Freemasonry put online a list of hundreds of famous sporting Freemasons. We can only speculate beyond the bare details: Bowes joined a West Riding lodge in 1935; Verity, the same lodge in 1939. Hutton joined a Pudsey lodge in 1942. Sutcliffe joined a London lodge and indeed became lodge master. Bryan Stott, a Yorkshire batsman and long-time Freemason of a later generation, confirmed those names in 2016 and added two: Cyril Turner and Frank Smailes. Was Sutcliffe, the older man, the influence on others? Or was membership of another all-male secretive group – an MCC touring party – the cause? Two 1930s captains in Australia and former Oxbridge men, Jardine and Gubby Allen, were Freemasons. Even if you find Freemasonry unimportant and silly, it’s worth studying like any group, that included some, and excluded others. At least one of Sellers’ family was a Freemason: his uncle Herbert, his father’s older brother, according to his 1930 obituary, was a member of a lodge in Keighley. We cannot say how widespread Freemasonry was among Yorkshire or any other cricket people, or if it mattered; and not for any sinister reason, but because we can never be sure we know everything. The Earl of Harewood, a patron of the county club, was a provincial grand master, although he was a figurehead for many other bodies. Sellers was not a Freemason, nor his father, nor indeed Yorkshire’s next captain Norman Yardley; or to be exact, the Library of Freemasonry in London reports that their names do not feature in indexes of members. The line that disciplines the fell