Lives in Cricket No 17 - Fuller Pilch

about the author Brian Rendell has lived in the county of Kent for the past 74 years and, despite remaining loyal to Middlesex, the county of his birth, has watched Kent play at Beckenham, Blackheath, Dartford, Hastings, Maidstone, where he saw Colin Cowdrey score his hundredth century, Canterbury and, of course, Lord’s. As a young man he played club cricket at some of the grounds graced by Fuller Pilch in his prime, more than a hundred years before. Following his retirement after thirty years in newspaper and magazine publishing plus ten years in local education, he set out to continue his research into the Bodyline controversy by obtaining exclusive access to the private letters written by Gubby Allen during the MCC tours of Australia in 1932/33 and 1936/37, and is the author of Gubby Allen: Bad Boy of Bodyline ? published by Cricket Lore in 2004 and Gubby Under Pressure published by the ACS in 2007. He recently assisted Alec Stewart in the completion of his Cricket Companion published by Corinthian Books and helped Bob Wilson, ex-Arsenal goalkeeper, with research for Life in the Beautiful Game published by Icon Books. He is a member of the Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians, the Cricket Society, the Friends of Shakespeare’s Globe and the Christopher Marlowe Society.