Fuller Pilch — Cricket's Best Batsman of the Pre-Grace Era Emerges from Norfolk

Cricket batting in 1820 was still based on the underarm bowling of the previous century: bat held back, weight on the back foot, ball played as it rose. The new roundarm style demanded a different technique. Pilch's response, developed in his late teens and twenties, was to advance down the pitch.

The Pilch family produced several cricketers; Fuller's elder brothers William and Nathaniel both played for Norfolk before him. Fuller's debut at Lord's in 1820 came on the back of strong East Anglian club performances and family recommendation.

Pilch was born in Horningtoft, a small Norfolk village, on 17 March 1804. He came from a labouring family and learned his cricket on village greens. In 1820, at 16, he travelled to London to play for Norfolk against MCC at Lord's — his first appearance at the headquarters of cricket. Through the early 1820s he played for various Norfolk and East Anglian sides; by the middle of the decade his reputation had spread across the country. Arthur Haygarth, in Scores and Biographies, would later call him 'the best batsman that has ever yet appeared'. Pilch's significance was not just statistical but technical. The new roundarm bowling of Lillywhite and Broadbridge defeated most of the old underarm-trained batsmen because the trajectory was faster, flatter and harder to read. Pilch developed a forward-defensive technique — playing well down the pitch with the bat advanced to smother spin and seam — that would become the foundation of orthodox batting for the next 150 years. His attacking shot, played by stepping out and driving on the rise, was christened 'Pilch's Poke' and is described in every nineteenth-century batting manual. He moved to Kent permanently in 1836, where he led the great Kent eleven of Mynn, Wenman, Hillyer and Felix. He retired from playing in 1854, ran the Saracen's Head in Canterbury, and died there in 1870.

Pilch's domination of batting averages from the late 1820s through the 1840s has no real parallel before W.G. Grace. Haygarth's verdict — 'the best batsman that has ever yet appeared' — was the consensus of his contemporaries. His move to Kent in 1836 made that county the leading side of the late 1830s and 1840s.