Lives in Cricket No 17 - Fuller Pilch

not be in vain. He played cricket in an age when wagers were won and lost at matches almost everywhere and, in a rare moment when his guard was down, he boasted to author and friend Frederick Gale that he was often involved. In The Game of Cricket , Gale reported him as saying, ‘They used to offer to take a sovereign fromme before going in, and pay me a shilling a run; and a good thing I made of it sometimes.’ He then added, ‘some of them, they would give me the shilling a run and my own sovereign back too very often, if Kent won.’ Not exactly the Hansie Cronje of the nineteenth century perhaps, just sound business transactions conducted by a man confident in his own ability. Such risk-taking suggests that there was more to him than might at first appear, and explains why at the end of his life he was in penury, lodging with his nephew and family, and dependent upon a pension of one pound a week from the Beverley Club in Canterbury. Even then, putting something together into the format for the Association’s ‘Lives in Cricket’ series was going to be much more difficult than I had at first imagined. There seemed no better place to start than by analysing all the matches in which Fuller Pilch appeared as recorded in the Association’s seven volumes of ‘Important Cricket Matches’ covering the years 1820 to 1863. For details of other matches I turned to the first five volumes of Frederick Lillywhite’s Scores and Biographies , although even these would not include every match in which Fuller had appeared, as not all club records had been preserved. Then I covered the bare bones of matches with extracts from press reports where they were available. With the help of historians and librarians from Norfolk, Suffolk, Yorkshire, Oxford, Cambridge, Nottingham and Kent, a picture of a career began to emerge. In presenting that career I have kept to the chronological order of the matches in which Fuller Pilch played, ignoring any difference in their status, so that the extraordinary diversity of his engagements, switching from team to team and place to place, can be fully appreciated. Fuller Pilch was at, or near, the peak of his profession for perhaps twenty years. He played in almost every important match of his time, typically appearing at about fourth in the batting order. His contribution to the growth of the popularity of cricket was immense. He was a practising tailor from a family of tailors but he made most of his living playing cricket and it cannot be denied that he always went where the money was. This usually meant joining clubs with wealthy sponsors where he would be paid for appearing in matches, coaching club members, acting as publican of a nearby inn, and even taking on the duties of groundsman. His early reputation was earned in Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridge and by regular appearances at Lord’s. Then he was lured to Kent with the prospect of even bigger earnings and played an important role in the creation of the greatest cricket event outside the big matches at Lord’s in the middle of the nineteenth century, the Canterbury Cricket Week. In many ways his career can perhaps be compared to that of a twentieth-century player who sold his reputation and services to Packer’s ‘World Series’ or the ‘rebel’ tours to South Africa, or his twenty-first-century equivalent who sells them to the highest bidder for his employment in money-making Twenty20 6 Preface