Lives in Cricket No 17 - Fuller Pilch

The funeral took place on Thursday, 5 May. The Kentish Gazette told its readers: The remains of Fuller Pilch, the once famous cricketer, whose death was announced in last Tuesday’s Gazette, were interred in St. Gregory’s Cemetery, on Thursday afternoon. Deference to the wish of the deceased, which if not actually expressed, was most certainly implied by his reserved manners, prevented any organised arrangement for his numerous friends to follow the much-respected cricket champion to his last resting-place; but this, however, did not prevent about forty gentlemen citizens of Canterbury who had for many years been in the habit of meeting and enjoying the society of ‘old Fuller’ from assembling in Lower Bridge Street, and following in procession the funeral cortege from thence to the cemetery. In the burial-ground a large party of persons, assembled to pay a last token of respect to a man second to none as a cricketer, and certainly unequalled in those qualities which command universal esteem and regard. A suggestion has, we understand, been made that some permanent record of Fuller Pilch’s qualities, professional and private, should be made, and if this intention be carried out, we are assured the necessary funds to accomplish it will be speedily forthcoming. By a strange coincidence, in the same edition of the newspaper and only a few inches below the report of the funeral, an advance notice gives details of a lecture, ‘The Story of Cricket’, to be given by Frederick Gale in Canterbury a few days later. The Gazette reported: ‘It is to be illustrated by a cartoon of a match played in 1743, together with drawings of bats from A pension and a monument 129 Bridge Street, Canterbury in 2010. Fuller Pilch lived in this corner of the city at the time of his death.