Lives in Cricket No 17 - Fuller Pilch

hear their ringing cheer as their favourite, in his first over, broke the ice and made one of his brilliant forward drives just out of reach of point and mid-off, and I could hear Pilch’s voice, ‘Come on: easy three, Mister Felix!’ And I looked forward with interest to see him represented in marble; but guess my horror when I found the bas-relief to be nothing more or less than an accurate representation of a short paralytic baboon who had sprained his leg in jumping over a broken hurdle. In 1922 the offending bas-relief was replaced by a bronze plaque showing Fuller at the wicket after a famous lithograph by the artist G.F.Watts. When the churchyard became redundant in 1978 the pedestal was taken to the Kent County Cricket headquarters at the St Lawrence Ground and the bronze plaque placed on the wall of the committee room. It is encouraging to know that the importance of Fuller Pilch has not been forgotten in Norfolk either. In 2004 the two-hundredth anniversary of the year of his birth was celebrated by the Horningtoft Heritage Society with a festival cricket match played in nineteenth-century costume during the village’s summer fête and an exhibition of the Pilch family history was assembled for display in the village church by cricket historian Terry Taylor, author of ‘Fuller Pilch: The Champion of Bury St Edmunds’ in Cricket Lore magazine. A pension and a monument 131 Fuller Pilch’s memorial in St Gregory’s churchyard, Canterbury as it was in the 1960s. The new headstone in the churchyard has added to the inaccuracy of the obelisk it has replaced.