Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

55 his own Yorkshire cap and placed it on the hero’s head. It was one quarter applause and three-quarters uncontrollable mirth. The cap was several sizes too big and blotted out Alec’s face like a candle snuffer. Whichever story was correct, Sellers understood that the cap mattered to a player; and those watching. How can we explain, though, the usual hand-over, without ceremony or warmth, as Wardle described his? ‘Brian Sellers called me over in the pavilion, announced sternly that he had some information to give me, and then told me without a smile that the committee had come to a certain conclusion about me. At that he shoved a cap into my hands and rumbled his congratulations.’ This was the club’s way – as faithfully carried out by Sellers – of managing a contradiction. Most employers, as we know well, care little for their workers; certainly few Yorkshire mines or factories in Sellers’ time did. The county cricket club was an exception; its caps publicly honoured, for life, a handful of men. Honouring miners and factory workers was what Stalin’s Soviet Union did. The only way to get round that in England – recognising working men as excellent, while keeping them down economically – was to hand out the cap as coldly as possible, to keep the wearers in their place; to make sure (an especially appropriate metaphor here) they did not become big- headed. We have far less evidence about what Sellers did off the field. Jim Kilburn and other Yorkshire reporters that followed the team were welcome to Off the field A 1936 team picture at Harrogate. Standing (l to r): Bright Heyhirst, Wilf Barber, Cyril Turner, Arthur Mitchell, Len Hutton, Hedley Verity, Bill Bowes, Frank Smailes, William Ringrose, Joseph Johnson. Seated: Arthur Wood, Herbert Sutcliffe, Brian Sellers, Paul Gibb, Maurice Leyland.