Lives in Cricket No 17 - Fuller Pilch

Chapter Nineteen William Pilch joins Uncle Fuller at Canterbury There is no record of just how ill Fuller Pilch had been at the end of the 1844 season. However, it seems to have been serious enough to sound warning bells about the welfare of the famous, if not ‘the most famous’, cricketer in the country. There were always other players able to keep an eye on him when he was playing cricket in the summer, and staff, customers and friends would have seen him every day behind the bar of the inns where he had been engaged as landlord when he was not playing. Now he was in Canterbury living alone and his only out-of-season occupation was caring for the Beverley Ground where there was little to do during the autumn and winter months. Even his assistant William Martingell had temporarily moved away to work for the Earl of Ducie, a former MCC president, in Gloucestershire. He could have devoted his energies to developing his old profession of tailoring, if his accommodation was suitable, but that would do nothing to provide company out of business hours. Someone must have suggested, perhaps one of those who had invested reputation and money in getting Canterbury Cricket Week up and running as an attraction for the fashionable aristocracy of south-east England, that the 41-year-old bachelor needed someone to move in with him as companion and friend. Or at least someone prepared to share a house with a man known for his taciturn manner. A relative familiar with his personality would be ideal and, as luck would have it, there was a potential candidate. His nephew William was already a practising tailor and, at 23 years of age, an experienced cricketer for Norfolk. Whoever decided to make contact with William and put the proposition to him, certainly had found the perfect answer. Over the next 12 years Fuller played some of his best cricket, while William earned a regular place in the Kent team, established a successful tailoring business in Canterbury, married a young Norfolk girl called Hephzibah at Walsingham in 1846, and had a son, Alfred, two years later, creating the ideal family home for his uncle. Their relationship would be celebrated in 1849 as part of a poem ‘The Cricketer’s Alphabet’, published in Bell’s Life , where it refers to the letter ‘P’: It also introduces Pilch, some call the Kentish Lion; And William Pilch, his nephew, and a very worthy scion, So mild and unassuming is the latter, sure I am They ought to designate the pair ‘the Lion and the Lamb’. 85