Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

83 Chapter Eight Treachery in Australia 1946/47 For what is treachery? It is the betrayal of familiars to strangers … Rebecca West, The Meaning of Treason (1949) If Sellers and his fellow passengers didn’t feel it on Sunday 13 October 1946, as they walked along the wooden jetty to the motor boat that would take them to their flying boat in Poole harbour, they did feel it the following Saturday morning when they stepped off it onto another boat at Rose Bay, and saw the Sydney Harbour Bridge. They had done more than cross the British Empire - stopping overnight in Rangoon and Singapore – on a thrilling, glamorous and expensive 12,400 miles journey, barely imaginable until well into Sellers’ lifetime. They had left the early winter of England for the early summer of Australia; left a country literally and perhaps metaphorically exhausted for a sunny one. Sellers had agreed to cover the MCC’s tour of Australia for the Yorkshire Evening Post – after the rival Yorkshire Evening News hired Bill Bowes – in August. Sellers had ended the 1946 season at Scarborough in good batting form; he was top scorer for Yorkshire when they followed on against MCC, and drew; and for the North in their first innings when they beat the South. The MCC tourists and reporters were already sailing for Australia. Sellers like so many felt the pull of Australia: English-speaking, yet attractively unlike England; an outdoors culture, a land of plenty. In November he told readers of ‘a small snack’ with coffee: ‘tomato soup, large fillet steak, two fried eggs, onions, chips, pot of tea and as much bread and butter as I could eat, all for three shillings’. He knew such detail would leave readers envious, starting their eighth winter on rations. ‘Everyone here is most kind. They feel they can’t do enough for you and are always asking you about England. I will refrain from mentioning again anything about food.’ A cousin in Sydney that Sellers hadn’t seen for 17 years had taken him in hand on arrival. After four days of ‘lovely surf beaches’ and other sights, he was in ‘lovely’ Melbourne for the Melbourne Cup – ‘the whole town seems to close down for this day’ - and with other journalists travelled by bus for 15 hours to ‘beautiful’ Adelaide. By Friday 25 October he was reporting on the men he and other selectors had picked. They had docked in Western Australia a couple of weeks before he set off, and were now making 506 for five declared against Bradman’s South Australia. ‘I can see that I am in for a wonderful trip among charming people,’ he wrote. What could go wrong? On 15 October, while Sellers was on the BOAC flying boat – probably over