Lives in Cricket No 17 - Fuller Pilch

Chapter One The Brothers Pilch Fuller Pilch was born in a cottage close to the village church, St Edmund’s, at Horningtoft, midway between Norwich and King’s Lynn in Norfolk’s fertile boulder-clay country, on 17 March 1804. 1 He was the sixth of ten children born to Nathaniel Pilch and Frances Fuller who were married on Christmas Eve 1792. Both surnames were derived from the Norfolk cloth-making industries. 2 Fuller had three older brothers, Nathaniel, William and John Fuller, who died in 1797 before reaching his first birthday. He also had two older sisters, Susanna and Frances. There were four children after Fuller, two of whom died very young. There are no records to confirm that Nathaniel Pilch senior, who kept a tailor’s shop in Holt, ever played cricket, but there may have been cricketers in his wife’s family as Volume One of Scores and Biographies includes, for the 1797 season, a ‘Grand Cricket Match’ played at Swaffham racecourse for a purse of 500 guineas ‘between Eleven Men of all England against Thirty-three of the County of Norfolk’ and the Norfolk team included John Fuller, James Fuller, Bayfield Fuller and Ben Fuller. The three Pilch brothers, Nathaniel, William and Fuller, all grew up to become good cricketers, all right-handed batsmen, with the youngest maturing into the greatest player of his generation. Nathaniel and William played regularly for Holt and later for other villages in north Norfolk including Brinton, Brisley, Litcham, Blickling and Hingham, up to 1848. Both were in the Norfolk team in 1820 with Fuller when he made his debut at Lord’s, aged only sixteen, and all three brothers played together for Holt in 1821 and 1822. But it would then be another seven years before they were re-united on the field in a Norfolk versus Suffolk match at Norwich in 1829; this time they were on opposite sides as Fuller had qualified to play for Suffolk after being engaged as the professional at Bury St Edmunds. Over the next twenty years the brothers still occasionally appeared in representative matches either against or alongside each other. Despite moving to Kent in 1835, Fuller never lost contact with his roots and even at the height of his fame enjoyed returning to Norfolk and Suffolk from time 9 1 He was ‘baptized privately’ the following day, according to the parish records, so he may have been a sickly infant. 2 A ‘fuller’ is or was a person involved in the scouring or thickening of cloth. A ‘pilcher’ was a maker or seller of pilches, odd-sounding outer garments ‘made of skin dressed with hair’. In the nineteenth century, the surname Pilch was almost entirely concentrated in East Norfolk: Fuller was common in eastern England but rare in the west.