Lives in Cricket No 17 - Fuller Pilch

Chapter Four Found by a ‘Suffolk spirit’ In a preview to the match to be played at Sheffield in 1828 featuring a combined Yorkshire, Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire eleven against an All-England team which included Fuller Pilch, the Sheffield Mercury claimed credit for Sheffield for the development of Pilch as a cricketer before he settled at Bury St Edmunds: ‘This man was originally Norfolk bred; migrated to the north for bread and water at an early age, and learned to handle bats and balls at Sheffield where he became distinguished, and where he was found by a Suffolk spirit.’ In a crowded family home where his two elder brothers were already training under their father to follow him into the tailoring trade, it is not surprising that the younger boy, also training to be a tailor, but showing exceptional promise as a cricketer, was sent somewhere his cricket talents could be developed under more experienced guidance. Sheffield was a suitable place to go, where cricket was being played seriously and more regularly than in Norfolk, and there may have been relatives available to take him in. There appears to have been an ongoing relationship with the city for the Pilch family and Fuller’s brother William would actually move there from Norfolk in later years. There is no record of Fuller playing at Sheffield before 1820, but eventually the sixteen-year-old returned to join his brothers at Lord’s to play for Norfolk on July 24 that year. 4 This was the occasion when William Ward, who broke the record for highest individual score with 278 for MCC in the match, had been sufficiently impressed to declare: ‘If that young Pilch goes on in his play, there is much promise in him.’ Back in Norfolk, Fuller is recorded as playing at Holt with his brothers against Nottingham twelve months after the Lord’s match, and then again twelve months after that, when they travelled to Nottingham for the return match on 29 July 1822. Thirteen months later he appeared again, but this time for Bury against Biggleswade at Cambridge. This was the first of 26 games that he played for the Suffolk town of Bury St Edmunds after he had settled there in 1823 and his reputation would eventually be celebrated in verse as part of a poem ‘The Crack Eleven of England’ that appeared in Pierce Egan’s Book of Sports : 18 4 The MCC v Norfolk match is now regarded as first-class by the ACS. A search of the CricketArchive database shows that at the time only two younger players had appeared in first-class cricket. These were both fifteen-year-olds, John Beeston, who played for MCC v Middlesex at the old Lord’s in 1794, and G.T.Smith, who played for Middlesex v Epsom at the new Lord’s in 1815. Birth date records of this period are of course distinctly patchy.