All Ten: The Ultimate Bowling Feat

28 Samuel Butler died. Of the game Wisden said that ‘the wickets were excellent’, but it also said that Summers was bowled by a shooter in the first innings, and as there is a suggestion that the fatal ball in his second pitched on a stone, this sounds unlikely. Following on Cambridge soon lost Money. In the last of his 29 first-class matches Butler had bowled him twice in the same day. Cambridge finished the first day on 64 for two but didn’t last too long next morning, Butler finishing with another five wickets, for 57 runs. He again dismissed Yardley, sending his off stump six yards out of the ground. Left 25 to win before a crowd of some 7,000 that would surge onto the ground at the end, Oxford knocked off the runs before lunch for the loss of two wickets. Ironically the winning run came from Cobden’s bowling. One of the umpires was another all-ten man, George Wootton. Butler is still the only man to take all-ten in the University match. His match figures of fifteen for 95 are also a record for the match and the second best ever for an Oxford bowler in first-class cricket, bettered only by Bernard Bosanquet’s fifteen for 65 against Sussex in 1900. The match having finished early and the weather good it was decided to entertain the large crowd by playing a match in the afternoon between MCC & Ground and a combined Oxbridge team. Umpire Wootton reverted to playing and bowled the unfortunate Walter Money for one. Butler played his last University match in 1873 taking six more wickets. Oxford had been left 174 to win and Butler went in with the scores level and seven wickets down. As Geoffrey Bolton pointed out in his History of the OUCC , it was a fine example of poetic justice that Butler again had a chance to score the winning run. We can only guess his thoughts as he walked to the wicket at the end of the second day. Fortunately there was a happier outcome for him this time as he edged his first ball past slip for four. The ghost of Cobden was, at least partly, laid to rest. Butler took 94 first-class wickets in his four-year Oxford career. This may seem a modest total, but not until 1897 did anybody achieve 100 wickets for them, left-arm medium pacer Foster Cunliffe eventually extending his tally to 181. Butler’s first-class career ended the following year with two matches for the Gentlemen. He moved to Somerset where he became a barrister and JP, playing for the county in their pre-first-class days. Samuel Butler died in 1903 aged 53.