Fulham F.C. of the early grounds listed below are likely to have been parks and parkland, which have now been developed. Even when the club purchased Craven Cottage and the surrounding land in 1894, they had to wait two years before they could play a game there. The Fulham mascot is Billy the Badger, who was the winning design sent in by Kyle Jackson after an online competition by the club. Billy the Badger wears the number 79 Fulham shirt, in reference to the club's year of founding, 1879. Controversy first surrounded Billy when he tried to cheer up Chelsea manager Avram
Bill Badger and the Pirates Bill Badger and the Pirates Bill Badger and the Pirates is a children's novel with a canal-side setting, written and illustrated in 1960 by the prolific author Denys Watkins-Pitchford, who wrote under the pseudonym "BB". The plot revolves around the release from prison of Bill Badger's sworn enemy, the cat Napoleon, and his attempt to capture Bill's barge, "Wandering Wind". The novel blends a stirring story with deeper moral issues. "Bill Badger and the Pirates" is the third in the Bill Badger series, which ran to eight books over a decade from the first in 1957 ("Wandering Wind", reprinted as