Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

76 their experience to the apprentices. When the County Championship began again in 1946 Sellers or any older man could only try to catch up with the lost schooling of the previous six summers. And one of the masters was not there any more. In The Cricketer in 1968 the Yorkshire journalist John Bapty recalled: In 1946 … Hedley’s name often turned up in the talk as we travelled about the country … I remember Sellers on a trip from Canterbury to London speculating on the part there might have been for Verity (38 a couple of months before he was fatally wounded) in Yorkshire’s rebuilding and it can be said here and now that Yorkshire’s post-war story would have been a very different one had there been no early morning attack in Sicily by the First Battalion The Green Howards on the morning of July 9, 1943. When news of Verity’s death reached England in September 1943, Sellers said in tribute: ‘I can only say that I was much honoured to play alongside such a great cricketer and fine character.’ Sellers spoke as spectators stood at Bradford before Yorkshire and Lancashire played the memorial match to Verity in aid of his widow and children in August 1945. Can we explain at least some of the widespread and lasting grief over the loss of Verity to the nagging guilt among his fellow players and civilians generally that they had survived, while he had not? Many cricketers, and sportsmen more generally, like many others – actors, writers, dentists - had taken the chance to avoid the front line, by in effect staying in their peacetime occupations. Wartime The inside cover of the 1940 Yorkshire club yearbook, signed by Brian Sellers for Allan Bailey (courtesy of Michael Ellison).