Lives in Cricket No 13 - AP Lucas

Chapter One The Lucas family John Arlott wrote of the prolific and versatile author and critic E.V.Lucas that ‘his cricket writing has charm and distinction and, simultaneously, carries conviction.’ 3 Lucas in turn wrote: ‘One of my greatest griefs, which has followed me all my life, has been to answer “No” to the question “Are you related to A.P. Lucas?”’ 4 Any cricket-loving namesake would have been disappointed at being unable to claim kinship with him, but it is not surprising that they were unrelated, for the surname Lucas is fairly common in southern and central England. It is the earliest form of the personal name Luke, or ‘bright and shining one’, and simply indicates adescendent of a man called Lucas. 5 A.P.Lucas was born on 20 February 1857 at 22 Chesham Place, Westminster . The house was part of the Lowndes Estate which was in the fashionable Central London parish of St George’s, Hanover Square , although he was baptised at St Peter's Eaton Square, Pimlico . The neighbours included Lord John Russell, Viscount Castlereagh and the Bishops of London and Salisbury. The Lucases were a comfortable, upper middle class family, descended from a long line of East Anglian gentry who could trace their origins back to the twelfth century, and who had sometimes moved in royal circles. 6 In 1180 a man called Lucas held land from the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds, where his descendants filled the offices of alderman and bailiff. After some two centuries, Lucas became the family’s hereditary surname and in 1359, Edmund Lucas married Elizabeth, sister of Sir Thomas Morieux, Constable of the Tower. Their great-great-grandson, Thomas Lucas (c1470-1531), became a privy counsellor and Solicitor-General to King Henry VII. He bought and united the three Suffolk manors of Little Saxham, and took personal charge of building a massive and splendid hall. Thomas’s great-great-grandson William (d 1640) married the daughter of Robert Gibson, an alderman of Norwich, and Gibson was to be a forename popular in the Lucas family for over two centuries. The first Gibson Lucas (1615-1698) was among the gentry appointed by parliament in 1643 to a standing committee for the Eastern Counties, in which Cromwell was second-in-command. His cousin, Sir Charles Lucas, 9 3 Introduction to Cricket All His Life: The Cricket Writings of E.V.Lucas, Pavilion, 1989. 4 E.V.Lucas, Reading, Writing and Remembering: A Literary Record , Methuen, 1932, p vii. 5 P.H.Reaney and R.M.Wilson, A Dictionary of English Surnames [Revised Edition], Oxford University Press, 1997. 6 This chapter is based mainly on J.J.Howard (ed), The Visitation of Suffolke: Volume 2 , Samuel Timms, 1871.