Lives in Cricket No 13 - AP Lucas

Chapter Eleven Essex cricketer, 1895-1907 No longer captain, Lucas made an important contribution to Essex’s success over the next few years and, as The Times obituary put it, ‘his method served him so well that right into middle age he kept up his form.’ While with Essex, Lucas experimented with an unusually long-handled bat. Home Gordon, in a 1906 article entitled Some Notable Cricket Bats , succeeds in filling half a page of charming anecdotes about Lucas without mentioning the bat or his reasons for using it, on which we can only speculate. Gordon comments on Lucas’s ‘wonderful facility of meeting the ball with the centre of the bat’ and his very fine playing of the cut stroke, so perhaps Lucas found that the bat gave him a little extra reach in making his favourite shots. 1895 and 1896 Lucas’s plea of business commitments in 1895 was genuine enough, for he played in only four of Essex’s 17 games. In the first of them, in early June, he carried on much as he had left off the previous year, bowled for nought and three by Leicestershire’s Arthur Woodcock. Woodcock took 12 wickets but the feature of the match was in the first innings when Harry Pickett took ten for 32, still the best analysis by an Essex bowler, and found himself on the losing side. Tragically, Woodcock and Pickett were both to take their own lives. Lucas next played in mid-July at Taunton. At last he returned to his old form, though not perhaps in the most testing of circumstances. By then he had dropped down to seven and he came to the crease with Essex handily placed on 358 for five, having bowled Somerset out for 246. The Somerset bowling was ‘none too deadly’ and Essex progressed at a steady 100 runs an hour. Carpenter and McGahey had already hit hundreds and Lucas’s 135 was the third, with 18 fours and a six. Tom Russell was again ‘lucky enough to be in with him for a long time’, though unlucky to fall one short of being Essex’s fourth centurion, which would at that time have been a record in a single innings. They added 184 for the eighth wicket, an Essex record that stood until 1936, when Jimmy Cutmore and Peter Smith put on 214 against the Indians. Essex’s 692 was the highest score ever made at Taunton but it was one of cricket’s shorter-lived records, for in the very next game Lancashire made a little matter of 801. Essex’s winning margin of an innings and 317, however, remains their largest, and the total their highest until 1990. 99