Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

47 followed ‘the Trueman doctrine – the remorseless harrying of opponents, terrorism true to the teachings of Lenin-Stalin-Bowes’. The satire on power politics of the Cold War was neat, likening the Yorkshire club to Communist Russia, and playing on the surname of the recent American president and the Yorkshire fast bowler. While Punch then was rather too obsessed about Communism, and cricket, for its own good, the metaphor did have meaning for Yorkshire; indeed ever since 1917, or Aristotle wrote Politics, it’s been the profoundest question for any club or political body: what works best, tyranny or democracy? The Soviet Union or any tyranny claimed strength from its people working with one agreed purpose, whereas a capitalist democracy could never agree on policy. We know that the unity of the one-party state is a front; that a group always has at least two points of view, and that suppressing all ideas except the rulers’ (who no doubt disagree among themselves) is unhealthy. So it was in the Yorkshire dressing room and around the committee table. Yorkshire had to pull off a trick that the Communist states of Sellers’ time could not; giving people liberty so as to prosper, while preserving the tyranny. A cricketer, or a citizen, or a Communist economy, would wither if forever told what to do. Yet what if people used liberty to disagree with the tyranny? Would that be a signal to the tyrant to change - or to take away the liberty? And even if a tyrant ruled well, eventually he would have to retire. How would he like to choose a new one? Plenty of evidence suggests that Sellers did have a soul. At Leicester in August 1938 Sellers was opening the batting on the second day with Arthur Mitchell. Onlooker of the Leicester Evening Mail claimed to see ‘little sparkle about Yorkshire’s batting … it was mainly due to Sellers that the crowd of nearly 2000 had something to applaud’. In the years between the world wars, when so many in authority harped on about ‘brighter cricket’ On the field A near full house at North Marine Road, Scarborough, at 5 pm one 1930s summer. Note the markings for tennis courts in the outfield.