Fuller Pilch, a Victorian cricketing hero who bamboozled opponents with a pioneering style of batting that became known as the “Pilch poke”, is proving as troublesome in death as he was in life.

The all-rounder is lying in an unmarked grave in the way of a planned university concert hall.

Building work in the churchyard of St Gregory’s, in Canterbury, cannot proceed until his remains, along with the remains of about 200 others, have been disinterred and reburied away from the site of the proposed music centre. The trouble is, the planners have no idea where he actually is.

The cricketer, who is commemorated in an engraving depicting him at the crease in a top hat and tie, became a national celebrity for his ability to strike fear into bowlers and batsman alike.

Times Archive 1913: The game of cricket: Fuller Pilch

He played forward a great deal, and his bat came down the wicket "like the pendulum of a clock"

• Fuller Pilch and Alfred Mynn

• Times Archive, 1842: Cricket, Kent v England

Related Links

• Pilch was master of the Victorian pitch

Hundreds attended his funeral in 1870, but the site of his grave is no longer known because the monument marking it has been moved. The 12ft obelisk was transported to Kent County Cricket Club’s headquarters when the churchyard became redundant in 1978. If a marker was left behind, it has been vandalised beyond recognition.

Canterbury Christ Church University hopes to build a 350-seater auditorium on the graveyard, which it owns, but it must first solve the mystery of where all the bodies are buried.

Mary Galliers, a spokeswoman for the university, said that the planners would have to go through parish records before the £8 million building project could begin.

“We have been advised that Fuller Pilch is buried within the churchyard and that his memorial stone was moved,” she said. “However, his name does not appear on the initial survey of graves undertaken as part of our planning application. We cannot confirm the location of his grave until a further survey is carried out if planning permission is granted.”

If it is granted, all the remains affected by the building work will be reburied in a memorial garden in a corner of the churchyard, Ms Galliers said. She added: “We appreciate the sensitivity of this issue and will approach it with appropriate care.”

Pilch’s name, if his remains need to be moved, will be commemorated on a plaque of all those affected by the building work.

Pilch hit ten centuries in his career, a remarkable feat at a time when pitches bore a closer resemblance to a meadow than the manicured fields of today.

He was one of the first batsmen to use pads. A pair that he used in the 1840s are the oldest to survive. His reputation also gave him a role in George MacDonald Fraser’s Harry Flashman novels. In Flashman’s Lady, Pilch is caught and bowled by the bounder in a fictional match between Rugby Old Boys and Kent in 1842.

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