Lives in Cricket No 17 - Fuller Pilch

of tiptoe-ing, with his bat over his shoulder; and if he did get the ball full, and it missed the watches, you heard her hit the palings on the off-side almost as soon as she left his bat. And what a temper Mr Felix had! And what a laugh too! And didn’t he like to go on with old Lillywhite a bit! He used to have a little joke when he came in. He would go into the middle, and pick up a little bit of paper or straw, or what not, and look up to old Lillywhite, who was a little impatient, waiting with the ball in his hand. ‘Good-morning, Mr Lillywhite! Halloa! A cricket-match on to-day, eh? And you a-bowling? Well, let’s have an innings.’ Well, old Lillywhite would be a little bit cross perhaps, sometimes, and would answer him a little sharp, and ‘You go and mind your batting, MUSTER Felix, and I will mind my bowling,’ and it was wonderful to see the care Mr Felix took for an over or two. It was no use sending him up one to hit with an England or Sussex field round until Mr Felix felt ‘set’; but directly he knew that hand and eye were master, to it he went, and if he got the chance he DID punish the bowling. Fuller had special memories of one other batsman: ‘Tom Adams, too, was a real good one in a match. He was never a first-rate bat, or a first-rate bowler, but a magnificent field, and he worked like a horse, and if the bowling got a little loose he was a rare punisher. He was a curious customer, and looked so knowing, with a corkscrew “gypsy curl” on each side of his face. And couldn’t he throw, and shoot, or play skittles, or anything else! And though he wasn’t a quarrelsome man, if there was a row and he was insulted, he was ready for any number – one down, t’other come on.’ Fuller doesn’t include Alfred Mynn in his list of batsmen, probably because he saw him predominately as a match-winning bowler. Mynn often batted for Kent lower down the order after an extensive bowling session, or Ned Wenman and Fuller were saving him for one to come. When Mynn joined the ‘Gentlemen of Kent’ or played for the Gentlemen against the Players at Lord’s, his reputation dictated that he must go in early, and this is reflected in his record for both teams, 1,402 runs in 50 matches with an average of 15.40, whereas in 90 matches for Kent he averaged only 12.71. Fuller himself was easily the most successful of the Kent batsmen of his time, scoring 2,844 runs at 19.61 for the county in 84 first-class matches. The other players scoring a thousand runs or more were Tom Adams with 2,291 runs, average 12.58 in 99 matches; Nicholas Felix with 1,528 runs, average 16.79 in 52 matches; and Ned Wenman with 1,063 runs, average 10.42 in 61 matches. Fuller was dismissed caught in 40 per cent of his completed innings in first-class cricket, three or four percentage points less often than these contemporaries, perhaps a consequence of his ability to play forward and ‘get over’ the ball. It is clear from Gale’s reporting of his conversations with Fuller Pilch that our subject understood the affection and admiration which were felt for the Kent elevens of the 1830s and 1840s. This esteem is nowadays most apparent in the well-known verses by W.J.Prowse published in 1861 by A pipe in Fuller Pilch’s back parlour 125