Lives in Cricket No 17 - Fuller Pilch

Matthews (a celebrated bowler) and another. We need scarcely add that extreme interest is excited. The stumps will be pitched at ten o’clock. Nottingham had been beaten only once in their previous 19 matches and for that sort of wager their sponsors were confident enough to risk the effects on the team of two days coach travel. The home side played well and won by 33 runs thanks to a top score of 25 from Fuller in their second innings. The match was over in one day and attracted enormous enthusiasm in Suffolk, according to the Bury and Norwich Post : ‘The game excited an unusual degree of interest with several 1000 persons attending; including the High Sheriff, the Duke of Grafton and their families and numerous assemblages of neighbouring gentry.’ The Bury club continued to grow in stature and at the start of the 1826 season announced in the Bury and Norwich Post that ‘Practice would commence at 12 o’clock in the new cricket ground. Meeting at the Angel Inn when the company of Gentlemen desirous of becoming a member is particularly requested.’ Gentlemen played cricket for fun but were always keen to improve their skills and would have expected that Fuller, as the club’s professional, a tradesman by comparison, attended all the practice sessions. No doubt some of the gentlemen rewarded him for his instruction in addition to the basic fee he received from the club. As a young tailor starting out on his own, any extra income would have been gratefully received. Bury started their season playing two games in May at Cambridge against undergraduate sides. Their next recorded match was at Saffron Walden on 21 and 22 July, with the home team winning by 32 runs. On 14 August Bury were at home to Melford and Fuller came very close to recording the first century of his career with an unbeaten 91 out of 131. The big match that summer came four days later against ‘Eleven Gentlemen from Newmarket, Cambridge and Saffron Walden’ for a stake of £50. Bury won this easily, with Fuller making an unbeaten 82 out of their first innings of 150, and his skills were acknowledged in the Bury and Norwich Post : ‘Pilch, as usual, sent the ball where he chose.’ Bury went to Saffron Walden again, on 28 and 29 August, and this time won by an innings. In the Saffron Walden side there was a great player from the Hambledon days of the eighteenth century, William Fennex, now 62, who had returned to settle in Suffolk. Fennex had played in the past for Sheffield clubs and he had been one of the earliest players to experiment with forward play. It is possible that he had coached the young Fuller when both were in Sheffield. The skills Fuller could have learned from Fennex enabled him to deal with the increasing amount of round-arm bowling that was finding its way into the game. In the return match at Newmarket against ‘Eleven Gentlemen from Newmarket, Cambridge and Saffron Walden’ on 8 and 9 September, Fuller top-scored with 48 out of 128 to help Bury win by an innings. Many people had been impressed by the progress of the young Fuller Pilch and word reached Lord’s where three experimental matches were being set up for the following year to test the legitimacy of round-arm bowling. 20 Found by a ‘Suffolk spirit’