Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

87 Treachery in Australia 1946/47 cricketing reasons. Except that Sellers might have had private reasons to take on Hammond, who had married in 1929, at Bingley parish church, a Bingley lady, Dorothy Lister, daughter of a Bradford wool merchant. In the small world of West Riding business families, did Sellers (or his wife) know her, and resent that Hammond was divorcing her for another woman? Sellers did not stop criticising Hammond. During the Third Test, when a big Australian eighth-wicket stand took the match and thus the series away from England, Sellers wrote: ‘Hammond still had two slips and a gully and no man out. I cannot say why but there it was for everyone to see.’ That said, Sellers gave due praise. Three weeks later when Hammond’s 188 against South Australia included his 50,000 th first-class run, Sellers reported: ‘Everyone was delighted to see Hammond’s return to form.’ And a month after, before Hammond’s bad back kept him out of the final Test, Sellers hoped he would be fit to play: ‘I feel sure he must get some runs some time. He cannot go on missing all the way.’ Sellers stayed out of another controversy, over leg before decisions by the home umpires against English batsmen. His was the voice of the cricketer Hammond and his first wife Dorothy Lister, at their wedding at Bingley parish church, with bat and wickets for the press cameras (presumably?). Crowds outside the Hammonds’ wedding in Bingley in April 1929.