Lives in Cricket No 17 - Fuller Pilch

Chapter Twenty-Five A pipe in Fuller Pilch’s back parlour Whenever the author and journalist Frederick Gale had the opportunity, he would return to Canterbury to enjoy a week-end break, or what he called being ‘out on a run from Saturday till Monday’, and he would always pay his friend Fuller Pilch a visit at the Saracen’s Head on the Sunday evening. Gale described his routine as ‘cathedral in the morning, luncheon etc; in the afternoon, tea, claret cup, etc., in the garden under the trees near the cathedral; and in the evening, a quiet talk in Fuller’s private room passed the day.’ He would make notes of Fuller’s opinions on various cricket subjects and in 1887 collated them together as a chapter in his book The Game of Cricket as if they came from one long conversation while sharing ‘a pipe in Fuller Pilch’s back parlour’. Most of the chapter consists of Fuller’s rambling assessments of players, in no particular order, in reply to Gale’s request: ‘Now, Pilch, let’s have a talk about the old Kent eleven’ and I have extracted and re-assembled them under various headings, accompanied by their Kent statistical records between 1825 and 1859. Perhaps we should imagine his remarks made in a gentle Norfolk accent. Fuller prefaced his reminiscences with an evaluation of the team as a whole: ‘Now I will tell you just what the Kent eleven was to my mind: it was an eleven of brothers, who knew one another, and never knew what jealousy was.’ He knew how proud they were of their county: ‘I know this, that we played for the honour of the county and the love of the game first,’ but he did not overlook those who had come forward with finance and support for the development of the cricket in Kent and elsewhere, ‘and, of course, the gentlemen took care of us in the second place.’ Before moving on to individual players, he then insisted on putting his opinions in perspective: ‘I don’t say that men can’t play as well now as then; but I do say that a stronger band of cricketers was never got together than our eleven at its best.’ Before looking at the batsmen, bowlers, wicket-keepers, long-stops and other fieldsmen, Fuller revealed some of the pressures behind choosing new players. Team Selection Fuller always tried to keep a couple of places for young amateurs from the public schools or universities but insisted that: money couldn’t get a gentleman into the Kent eleven. Some one might say to me, ‘Pilch, Mr So-and-so, the rich brewer or banker’s son, wants 121