Fuller Pilch — The Greatest Batsman Before Grace — Retires from First-Class Cricket, 1854

Cricket pitches in the early nineteenth century were rolled but not properly dressed. The standard batting technique was a back-foot sliced shot or a violent hit; few batsmen could survive long against good roundarm bowling. Pilch's forward play was a deliberate departure that allowed him to dominate.

By the early 1850s Pilch was over 50 and his powers were declining. Younger batsmen — including the rising Surrey men George Parr and Tom Hayward — were taking over the leading positions. The 1854 season was a quiet one for Pilch, and he retired from county cricket at its end.

Fuller Pilch was born at Horningtoft in Norfolk in March 1804 and made his first-class debut for Norfolk in 1820. By the late 1820s he was already the leading batsman in eastern England, but the demand for his services took him southwards: in 1835 the Town Malling club in Kent paid him £100 a year, an unprecedented sum, to move and play for them. From 1836 he was the leading professional in the Kent eleven through that county's golden age — alongside Alfred Mynn, Nicholas Felix and the wicket-keeper Tom Box — and was the leading run-scorer for Kent in twelve of his nineteen seasons with the club. Pilch's batting was technically revolutionary: on rough early-Victorian wickets where most batsmen played back, he stepped firmly forward, smothering spin with the front leg and pad, and pushed the ball straight down the pitch. The shot was called the 'Pilch poke' and is recognised as the ancestor of the modern forward defensive. He retired from the Kent eleven at the end of the 1854 season, played a handful of festival matches in 1855, and then took up the Saracen's Head pub in Canterbury, where he had been landlord since 1842. He died in 1870, by which time the young W.G. Grace was already hailed as the new master.

“Pilch was described as the greatest batsman ever known until the appearance of W.G. Grace.”

Pilch's retirement coincided with the rise of Surrey as the dominant county and with the breakaway of the United All-England Eleven from Clarke's AEE. The Kent of the Mynn-Pilch-Felix era was already in decline; the county would not be a leading force again until the 1900s.