Lives in Cricket No 17 - Fuller Pilch

tournaments. Fortunately for Fuller he was seeking employment as a professional cricketer in the first half of the nineteenth-century and not in the twenty-first. If his home club had no fixture that required his services he always reserved the right to augment his earnings by accepting any engagement to play anywhere for any team that came calling. In 2010 such a mercenary attitude attracted the criticism of ex-England captain Mike Atherton, writing in The Times , who called it ‘Modern cricket in extremis ’ and censured any cricketer for selling his talent in this way as a player ‘with no feelings for the club, the supporters or players, attempting to do a professional job for which he was paid handsomely.’ Unlike the modern international cricketer, Fuller’s window of opportunity to cash in on his reputation was restricted to less than five months of the English summer. England was at war with Napoleon when Fuller Pilch was born and the future King George IV was still Prince Regent when he first played cricket as a boy. The Crimean War was at its height when he retired and Queen Victoria had been on the throne for thirty-two years when he died in 1870. In his early career players arrived at matches between towns and villages by coach, wagon, dray, on horseback or on foot. For longer journeys a stagecoach was hired, with half the team on the roof. Such coaches were known as a ‘Godpermit‘, short for ‘God permit I arrive safely’ because of the dangers of travel by road. The number of stagecoach journeys Fuller would have to make every season was remarkable, some of them taking 24 hours or even longer, in conditions as far removed from the team buses and business-class air travel enjoyed by the modern international cricketer as it is possible to imagine. By the time he retired, a network of railways had been constructed that covered England so that teams could be carried between cities and towns hundreds of miles apart in a matter of hours rather than days. As a young batsman Pilch had to learn to deal with the problems posed by skilful under-arm bowling before adjusting his technique to master the new dangers presented by the revolutionary round-arm method. Round-arm bowling was illegal according to MCC until 1828 when a limited version was written into the Laws, but it was condoned for many years before that by clubs with bowlers practising a version they believed satisfied the confusing Law that was supposed to be in operation. It was finally given the green light in 1835. By then batsmen had started to experiment with pads to protect their legs, worn originally out of sight under their trousers, and padded gloves to prevent damage to fingers. Heads were already being protected by top hats, usually black, sometimes white. After retirement from cricket, Fuller Pilch could be found most days in his parlour at the Saracen’s Head Inn in Canterbury, where from 1855 to 1866 he was joint landlord with his nephew. It was there that Frederick Gale sought him out and persuaded the veteran to reminisce about his glory years on the playing fields of Kent and beyond. Gale published the results Preface 7