Lives in Cricket No 17 - Fuller Pilch

Bell’s Life at the time of Alfred Mynn’s death and noted in this book as an ilustration on page 56. In reporting that every man of the eleven was ‘glad and proud to play his part’, and in listing the five main players – Felix, Wenman, Hillyer, Fuller Pilch and Alfred Mynn – those verses seem to accord with Fuller’s own modest view, from the tone of his remarks to Gale, that Kent’s successes were attributable to the combined skills of a group of players rather than to particular individual performances. When Gale asked what he thought of present cricket, Fuller was surprisingly unimpressed, bearing in mind that, to future historians, cricket was in the process of entering a golden age: ‘There’s too much of it, and you know what a man is going to do before he does it. It is like seeing a play over and over again, when they come in at the same place and go out at the same place every night; there is more business than pleasure in it, too often.’ Some of his other opinions sound familiar to the twenty-first century lover of cricket: ‘There is so much swagger and dress in the cricket-field now sometimes, and so much writing and squabbling with committees and secretaries and players about cricket, that I often feel that the heart of the game is going, and that very many are playing for their own glory more than for their county now.’ A pipe in Fuller Pilch’s back parlour 126