Lives in Cricket No 13 - AP Lucas

Chapter Two Uppingham School, 1870-1874 In August 1869, A.P.Lucas followed his brothers to Uppingham School. Founded in 1584, it had been a small, high-quality local grammar school, but this was the period when the railways were radically changing many aspects of society. In 1853 Edward Thring was appointed headmaster and Uppingham was transformed into a public school, though not in the very front rank. It was not one of the nine great schools referred to by the Clarendon Commission of 1861-64 as ‘significant ... in the public eye’, nor in cricket terms were its games played at Lord’s or covered in any detail by Wisden . It was, though, one of a group known as ‘Elevated Grammar Schools’ that also included Tonbridge and Repton. 18 The embodiment of the cult of ‘muscular Christianity’, Thring developed the idea of an education for the full man, in which team games, classical learning and Anglicanism prepared his boys for their role in governing an empire. Donald P.Leinster-Mackay claimed in the Dictionary of National Biography that Thring was ‘the greatest public school headmaster during the second half of the nineteenth century.’ Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley, co-founder of the National Trust and a contemporary of Philip and Arthur Lucas in the 1870 Uppingham cricket eleven, wrote that Thring was ‘the very pulse of the machine’. 19 Sixty Years of Uppingham Cricket is a remarkable book, written by one of H.H.Stephenson’s pupils, William Seeds Patterson, who went to great trouble to seek out original sources for his work. 20 He was himself no mean cricketer and played in 41 first-class matches between 1874 and 1882, including three appearances for the Gentlemen in 1876 and 1877. His book gives an inside view of the ‘effortlessly superior’ schooling enjoyed by upper-middle class Victorian Englishmen. Their fathers’ money bought them facilities in the classroom and on the playing field that working class children could scarcely imagine. Between 1853 and 1872 £81,196 was invested in sporting facilities at Uppingham, where the playing fields, said even now to be the largest in the country, ‘were themselves significant symbols of security and élitism’. 21 The book is all the more impressive because of its unquestioning assumption that such privileges were right and natural. Servants, shopkeepers, cricket coaches and others of the 16 18 See Mangan, op cit ., p 2. 19 In Edward Thring, Teacher and Poet , details quoted in Mangan, op cit. , p 79. 20 Much of this section is based on Patterson’s book, published by Longmans in 1909. 21 See Mangan, op cit ., p 100.