All Ten: The Ultimate Bowling Feat

82 Ernie Vogler Griquas followed on and with Vogler taking four wickets in his first two overs before long they were 18 for seven. Some tailend hitting revived things a little, and last man Henry Druce at last managed to break his first- class duck at his fourth attempt, but the end came at four o’clock with the score again 51. With thirteen ducks in the match, Griqualand West had been dismissed twice in less than two and a half hours. The only batsman not dismissed by Vogler at least once was Brixton-born George Hickman who had been run out without scoring on debut in the first innings. He had an interesting career, playing three matches in 1906/07, one more 14 years later at the age of 40, and then umpiring three in the 1930s, the last involving Walter Hammond’s 1938/39 tourists. The Rand Daily Mail called the proceedings ‘a fiasco’. It was the first of three matches that the Griquas would lose in the tournament by an innings and over 300 runs, and they would become so disheartened that, rather than face the might of Transvaal in their last match, they conceded the match and went home. Vogler’s figures had improved on the previous record (jointly held by Moss and Howell) and have only been beaten three times since. It had been a bit of a one-man show: all but one of his 16 victims had been either bowled, leg-before or caught and bowled. Byes had contributed significantly in both Griqualand innings. Clearly wicketkeeper Arthur Melvill found Vogler’s variations a bit of a handful. He had stood behind the stumps to him before, although to be fair he wasn’t a regular keeper. Vogler had nearly taken an all-ten just two matches previously playing for MCC at Lord’s against the 1906 West Indian tourists, the one wicket to evade him being a run-out. He later also played four (non-Cup) matches for Transvaal and finished 1906/07 as the season’s leading wicket-taker with 55 victims. Vogler peaked when South Africa met England in 1909/10 in a series won 3-2 by the home side largely thanks to Faulkner (545 runs and 29 wickets), and Vogler whose 36 wickets were a Test series record. After this high point his career quickly petered out. The following season the South Africans toured Australia, losing 4-1 in a series in which the Australian left-arm pace bowler Bill Whitty took 37 wickets to surpass Vogler’s record. Away from the matting pitches of home, with the exception of Schwarz, the much vaunted South African attack failed against the batting power of Australia, Victor Trumper et al. Vogler particularly disappointed, Wisden referring to his ‘deplorable failure’. After Australia Vogler played just two more first-class matches and as a professional for various clubs in Britain. Curiously his last first-class match was for Woodbrook Club and Ground, in Ireland, against the South Africans who were in Britain participating in the ill-fated 1912 Triangular Tournament. Of Vogler’s 393 first-class wickets 64 had been taken in 15 Tests. Three years earlier in a remarkable two-day, non-first-class match, Vogler, playing for Woodbrook, had scored a century in an innings in which County Galway’s William ‘Budge’ Meldon had taken ten for 126, and then taken his own all-ten (for 41) in Galway’s second innings to add to the six wickets he had taken in their first. Although there are suggestions that he drank heavily, Vogler lived to a reasonable age, dying in Pietermaritzburg in 1946. He was more fortunate