A Clear Blue Sky: A remarkable memoir about family, loss and the will to overcome. Duncan Hamilton

period. The anything-goes 1960s and then the still more liberal 1970s proved baffling for him. He seemed to consider Headingley as his fiefdom. He spoke in orders. Anyone who didn’t march to his exact tune was in trouble. My dad described him as ‘easily the most powerful and influential man in the club’. Sellers was a suit-and-tie and a short-back-and-sides man, his hair Brylcreemed with a parting straighter than a Roman road. He disliked jeans and trainers and open-necked shirts with flowery patterns.

      My dad had enough going on in his life. For a start, there was the fanfare of publicity he got as a teenager, which ratcheted up expectations of him. Then there were the higher and more intense demands of the first-class game, so different from the Bradford League, where he’d played a lot of his cricket. And there was his new environment and the task of simply fitting in as a young guy around much older blokes.

      Sellers could have cut him some slack. Instead he was confrontational, concerned as much about my dad’s appearance as his performances, a matter someone more supportive and more sympathetic might have let slide for a week or so. One morning he told my dad to get his hair cut. The next, seeing him again, he asked why it hadn’t been done. My dad made some wishy-washy excuse – based around the fact he didn’t have a car – in the unrealistic expectation that Sellers would forget all about it. He didn’t.

      ‘I’ve made an appointment for you,’ Sellers said, giving him the name of a barber’s. He paid the bill in advance. He also gave the barber ‘strict instructions’ not to spare the shears. My dad came out looking like a ginger billiard ball. Sellers checked up on him, growling his approval at what he saw. ‘Tha’ looks like a lad now,’ he said. It wasn’t so much what Sellers did – Yorkshire have always been strict about looking the part – but the way he did it, apparently never comprehending that his brusqueness could have been off-putting.