Ochse Arthur Image 1 Eastern Province 1929

Description

Graaff-Reinet, Cape Province born fast bowler Arthur Ochse played intermittently and sometimes effectively for Eastern Province from 1921-22. He first came to notice by taking the last six wickets for 60 runs in a heavy defeat of Orange Free State in 1924-25. In 1927-28, when an English team toured, he was picked for a South African XI in a non-Test first class match against the touring team and took three wickets. That performance did not get him into the Test team, but when Eastern Province played a first class match with M.C.C. in early January, Ochse took 5-31 runs as the tourists were dismissed in their first innings for just 49 at Port Elizabeth; they recovered to win the match by 10 wickets courtesy of an unbroken second innings opening stand of 187.

South Africa had lost the first two Tests of the series, and Ochse was called into the side for the third match. Ochse then made his Test match debut for South Africa against England at Durban in January 1928, the first of his three Test match appearances. But on a batsman’s wicket at Durban he was expensive and did not take a wicket; in the second England innings, he did not bowl at all. He was dropped from the Test team after this single match and did not play again in the 1927-28 season.

In the 1928-29 season, Ochse played only one first class game for Eastern Province against the perennially weak Orange Free State side; in taking 4-40 and then 6-37, he achieved both the best innings and best match figures of his cricket career. The bowling led to his selection for the 1929 South African tour of England with Gummy Deane’s team.

However Ochse had a mixed tour. Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack, reviewing the tour as a whole, said that the South Africans “laboured under a disadvantage in being without a fast bowler of real class”. It went on: “Ochse worked hard but his limitations were somewhat pronounced.” His bowling “was often very erratic”. The lack of control and consistency showed in the overall first class cricket figures, where Ochse was the most expensive of the regular bowlers on the tour, taking just 52 wickets at an average of 34.51 and conceding runs at more than three an over, expensive by contemporary standards; he also failed to take more than four wickets in any single innings.

Conversely, though he was selected only for two Test matches, Ochse’s figures in the Tests bore comparison with those of his colleagues, who were also badly treated by England’s batsmen; Ochse finished top of the Test bowling averages with 10 wickets at 31.70 apiece. In the First Test at Edgbaston, he took 4-79 in the first innings and followed that with 2-88 in the second innings, when only four England wickets fell. This was his best Test performance. In the Second Test at Lord’s, he was wicketless but economical in England’s first innings, but took four in the second innings, though his 20 overs, none of them maidens, cost 99 runs. The Times reported that Ochse was “very severely treated” by Maurice Leyland and Maurice Tate, both of whom scored centuries; it went on: “They drove his over-pitched balls as if he were a slow bowler, and when he dropped short their cutting was capable of beating the deep third man.” Ochse was dropped from the Test team after this and did not play Test cricket again.

Back in South Africa, Ochse played just one match in 1929-30 and then appeared in just two further seasons, 1931-32 and 1937-38, when he played quite regularly and took wickets at reasonable cost. In 45 first class matches Ochse averaged 10.44 with the bat with a highest score of 41. With his bowling he took 140 wickets at 28.33 apiece, with the single ten wicket match against Orange Free State and 7 five wicket hauls.

His father, also Arthur Ochse, twice played Test cricket for South Africa, playing in his country’s very first Test match in March 1889, and was killed at Messines Ridge on the Western Front during Germany’s 1918 Spring Offensive in the First World War.

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