Fuller Pilch: A Straightforward Man PDF Download

Author: Brian Rendell
Publisher: Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians
ISBN: 1905138970
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
Almost two hundred years after he first played at Lord’s, his distinctive name can still summon up images of batsmen who wore top hats and no pads, and bowlers who wore braces. Fuller Pilch (1803-1870) was the leading batsman in England ‒ the world even ‒ for about a dozen years in the 1830s and 1840s, at the time of the great Reform Act, the young Queen Victoria and the expansion of the railways. Using his height, he was among the first batsmen to develop forward play into an effective means of countering the new art of round-arm bowling. Born in Norfolk, he developed his batting skills in East Anglia, but was eventually attracted to Kent where, at West Malling and in Canterbury, he was the cornerstone of that county’s first great elevens. County cricket was then limited in its scale and so, to make a living he travelled widely, taking part ‒ like a modern practitioner ‒ in matches in all kinds of formats. Naturally he played regularly for and against the gentlemen at Lord’s. But he also appeared in single-wicket games, village cricket, in the All-England Eleven against eighteens and twenty-twos under the gangmaster William Clarke, even in ‘three-a-sides’. Brian Rendell traces out the life of a quiet, dignified man, unaffected by and almost innocent of his celebrity, from his country beginnings to his poverty after the financial crisis of 1866.