Lives in Cricket No 17 - Fuller Pilch

organising the week, intervened and ordered the game to proceed, with E.M.Grace playing for MCC. It is not known whether Fuller was involved in settling this pre-match dispute but his presence must have had a calming effect upon the situation. Even so, Kent took the field ‘under protest’ when the game started. To rub salt in Kent’s wounds, E.M. took five of their first-innings wickets and then scored an unbeaten 192, the highest-ever score seen at the St Lawrence ground. He then took ten wickets in Kent’s second innings. It might have been all eleven wickets if one of the Kent Gentlemen, R.J.Streatfeild, had not been absent. Kent’s captain, W.South Norton, who came from the Town Malling Club, never played at Canterbury again, either by choice or because he was no longer welcome. There was another young son in the Grace family who was showing promise as a cricketer, but Fuller only ever stood as umpire in one match at Canterbury in which W.G. played. In 1866, the Gentlemen of the South played the ‘wandering’ amateur side I Zingari and Fuller watched the young man, destined to dominate the game for the next thirty years, score 30 and 50 in his two innings for the Gentlemen. There is no record of any conversation between the two great players. W.G. never mentioned meeting Fuller Pilch in any of his memoirs, and W.G. does not appear in any of Fuller’s conversations with Frederick Gale. The game had moved on, over-arm bowling was now permitted, wickets were better prepared and the age gap between a 62-year-old legend of the game and an earnest 18-year-old may have been impossible to bridge with attempts by either to discuss batting skills and techniques. Fuller did tell Gale in 1869 that ‘Daft, Jupp and Mr Grace were three of the most extraordinary players he ever saw in his life,’ but the Mr Grace he referred to was E.M., not W.G. Umpire, coach, groundsman, bat-maker and mine host 120 Much altered after Fuller’s time, the Saracen’s Head Inn, dating from the seventeenth century, was demolished in 1969 to make way for the Canterbury inner ring road. This picture shows the building shortly before its destruction.