Lives in Cricket No 13 - AP Lucas

Chapter Five The Australian tour, 1878/79 In 1878/79, Lord Harris led a party that toured Australia at the invitation of the Melbourne Cricket Club, the nearest Australian equivalent to the Marylebone club. The tour was characterised by languid intervals of sightseeing and sociability, and contrasted greatly with the fiercely commercial Australian tour of England a few months earlier, where match followed match and the players travelled overnight between games. Unlike previous English touring sides, it was essentially amateur but some of the leading men were unavailable – most notably the nominally amateur W.G.Grace, presumably because he was not offered enough money. The team was therefore weak, so it was strengthened by the professionals George Ulyett and Tom Emmett. Lucas came down from Cambridge in 1878 and, although he had a relatively disappointing season, the reputation he had gained in the previous two years was enough to earn him an invitation. The team was said to be strong in batting and fielding, although in fact their catching often let them down and they had no genuine wicket-keeper. They also lacked a quality slow bowler, so Lucas often came on as first change. His Times obituary recalled in 1923: Mr Lucas was not much of a traveller, but he went to Australia with Lord Harris’s team in 1878/79. During that tour he had to do far more bowling than he had expected, the side being almost wholly dependent on Emmett and George Ulyett. How with such limited resources they ever managed to get their opponents out remains to this day a marvel. Harris 41 later commented: A.P.Lucas, who, not claiming to be or indeed being in England a bowler of first-class calibre, became, before leaving Australia, from having to bowl constantly, of quite the first class. Aged only 21, Lucas was the youngest of the tourists, and he enjoyed what would in twenty-first century parlance have been called a gap year. His father must have been proud that the boy he coached ‘on the paternal lawn near Esher’ had developed into one of the finest young batsmen in England. Orton Lucas had already lost two of his four sons, so perhaps wanted to give Bunny the experience of a lifetime before he settled down to the world of work. 45 41 Lord Harris, A Few Short Runs, John Murray, 1921, p 148.