Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

59 up: ‘The self-discipline of the Sellers era avoided criticism perhaps because it had not become oppressive when cricket was interrupted.’ Kilburn might have lightened his style by telling a story, giving an example (why was discipline under Sellers not oppressive? and was Kilburn implying it became oppressive after 1945?). Sellers did give some clues while he was writing for the Yorkshire Evening Post . On his return to England on Wednesday evening, 19 March 1947, he told well-wishers how he longed to be in action with a Yorkshire team again: ‘It will be grand to be with the lads again on English turf.’ Sellers, had just turned 40, was far from the only cricketer, then or since, to call his fellow players ‘lads’. It suggested the captain – or rather the less formal ‘skipper’ – was one of those ‘lads’, familiar, even juvenile. Like other groups, the ‘lads’ had their own words, which served to bind the group together, and kept out everyone else who did not understand. Again, thanks to Sellers’ months as a newspaper correspondent, we know a few of those words, otherwise lost in the air of the dressing room. The Yorkshire Evening Post’s diary column in November 1946 pointed out that Sellers used such language to describe an innings of Hutton; it was a ‘jaffa’: To the Yorkshire players anything that is a jaffa is just about as good as it can be and anything that is sawdust is right at the other end of the scale. A poor thing which should not have happened. A jaffa of a ball because bigger than other oranges and sawdust of no use to anyone. Sadly, most of those private words are as lost to us as the reasons why men built Stonehenge. We have one more, again from when Sellers arrived in Poole Harbour by flying boat. ‘Little John’ of the Yorkshire Evening Post reported: ‘… for those who had gone out in the tender to meet him there was the old cheerful ‘shabash’ heard so often in happy and successful times in the Yorkshire dressing room.’ Shabash is Urdu for ‘bravo’, a sign of how words from the British Empire entered the English language. Jaffa as a word has stuck, at least inside cricket; sawdust and shabash have not. The words had meaning only to Sellers and his men, the same as their nicknames. Again, Yorkshire were not the only team to revel in nicknames; any short man was ‘Tich’ for instance. That there were so many nicknames under Sellers told of men at home with one another: ‘Tiddly’ Barber; ‘Ticker’ Mitchell. Kilburn suggested that Sellers liked such names: “… ‘Timber’ [Wood] was scarcely avoidable in a dressing room infected by the uninhibited A.B.Sellers”. As Kilburn explained, Sellers was ‘Skipper’ inside the dressing room. That neatly honoured the office of captain, the same as a football manager was ‘Gaffer’, while allowing for the fact that the holder of the office kept changing. Otherwise, Sellers was nicknamed ‘Cracker’, short for Crackerjack, ‘in retort to repeated insistence that Yorkshire were the crackerjacks of county cricket’. Such slang is hard to pin down at the time, let alone later, because each era has its own. A cracker-jack was an excellent person or thing, a maestro; we might say ‘the bees’ knees’, or ‘champion’. From the northern slang word ‘crackers’, and the BBC TV children’s show (after Sellers’ time as a player), we might also think of a crackerjack as mad or zany. Slang words might mean nothing, or start with meaning forgotten with time, and be said for the shared sheer nonsense. Off the field