Lives in Cricket No 17 - Fuller Pilch

Preface My interest in the cricket career of Fuller Pilch began when I was researching material for a history of nineteenth-century single-wicket contests played for the ‘Championship of England’ and how they appealed to the public in comparison to the famous bare-knuckle prize-fights of the time. I knew that no biography had ever been written of this great cricketer, not even as part of the ACS ‘Famous Cricketers’ series. He had, though, won the title ‘Champion of England’ in 1833 and remained unchallenged for five years, admired and respected by the hundreds of spectators who came to see him play. Thus he consolidated his position as the premier batsman in club and representative cricket at Lord’s and elsewhere. According to William Denison, writing in 1846 in Sketches of the Players : ‘There has been no man, having played as many matches, who has approached him in effectiveness and safety of style, or in the number of runs he obtained.’ The idea of a long overdue biography grew as my investigations seemed to show that, despite being recognised by modern historians as an important figure, he was usually overshadowed by that colossus of Victorian cricket, the great all-rounder Alfred Mynn, in much the same way as the technically correct scoring-machine Geoffrey Boycott was overshadowed by the exploits of Ian Botham almost 150 years later. When I began my research for the material for a biography, I soon learned why nobody had tried to write one before. Fuller Pilch was a very private man. He had never married and there was no paper trail to follow. He left no diary, no letters remained in the possession of descendants waiting to be discovered and their contents revealed. In his book Seventy-One Not Out , William Caffyn described him as ‘a remarkably quiet man, with no conversation, and never seemed happier than when behind a churchwarden pipe, all by himself.’ His obituary in the Kentish Gazette stated that he ‘was a man of somewhat reserved manners’. At the height of his fame, the Norwich Mercury wrote that ‘his manly, straight-forward, yet unassuming conduct, his energy, his cool determined courage, and last but not least, his unimpeachable truth and honesty, have gained for him the respect and confidence of his employers as well as of his associates.’ The Kent Herald agreed that ‘he was relied upon by the patrons of cricket as not only a man who would do his best in the game but would do it with a simple unassuming modesty, which contrasted most favourably with other and lesser stars in the cricket world.’ It seemed unlikely that I would find enough material to write an interesting history of such a paragon of virtues. Then I came across a brief glimpse of an unexpected aspect of his personality which suggested my efforts might 5