Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

89 Treachery in Australia 1946/47 have captained the 1948 and 1949 Test teams for England. But cricket in England does not work out that way.’ By March 1947, Sellers was no longer an MCC selector. Yardley, as the new England captain, was the committee’s northerner instead. Sellers did however become a selector again, in 1949 and 1950; in 1951 Yardley became chairman of selectors; and when Yardley stepped down Sellers returned for the 1955 season. His son Andrew recalled a story from Sellers’ time as a selector, and while he drove a ‘Bradford van’, by the Bradford motor company Jowett: I learned to drive on one of those things. He had one for ten years, and he was down in Birmingham, a Test match in Birmingham, and he was staying at the same hotel as, oh crikey now, Freddie Brown, the captain of England at that stage. So father offered to give him a lift to the ground in his van. Which they did and they got to the front gate and of course they were stopped because they didn’t have vans in there, there were only Rolls- Royces and Jaguars. In those days it wasn’t a wind-down window, it was a pull-down window; ‘what seems to be the problem?’. ‘You can’t come in here without the correct documentation.’ He says, ‘right, my name is Brian Sellers,’ and he explained that he was a selector, “and if you look across into the passenger side over here, that fellow is called Freddie Brown who is the captain of the bloody team. So he says, ‘we either come in or the flaming game doesn’t start, one or the other.’ And he was waved in quickly; he enjoyed that sort of thing.” What spoils the story is that Brown never played a Test match at Birmingham; Andrew Sellers, understandably, like all of us, can be weak on inessential details. Brown did play in a Test trial at Birmingham in 1953. What matters most is that Sellers was there at all; as a true amateur he was happy to put in the time as a selector; the November 1946 episode had not affected his abilities; he was essentially sound. Perhaps the MCC could forgive, despite what Constantine said. Or, more cynically, because Hammond curiously faded out of English cricket, Sellers was free to carry on, despite that blotted copybook; provided he behaved. Sellers did not repeat the offence. Indeed, ironically, or hypocritically like many in cricket who have taken the media’s money, he hated – or at least distrusted – journalists. One of them, Don Mosey, once wrote how Sellers called him ‘that shit who writes about Yorkshire cricket’. Mosey told of how the two met at Harrogate after Sellers had been in hospital for a hip operation, because of arthritis: He spotted me walking through the drizzle towards the pavilion, waved one of the sticks on which he was hobbling, and roared over the heads of the startled (and very wet) spectators, ‘I suppose you’ll be sorry to see me around again.’ ‘No,’ I replied, ‘As one of them-there to another, welcome back.’ He took this in, considered it, then bellowed a great laugh. We never had a cross exchange of words after that.