Lives in Cricket No 13 - AP Lucas

Chapter Eight Stock Exchange agent, 1880-1923 Though several of Lucas’s family and friends were clergymen and he was a devout Christian, he chose not to go into the church. Instead, in 1880, he became a jobber on the London Stock Exchange. 61 At Cambridge his degree was in mechanics and he had been assistant treasurer of the University Cricket Club, so he was clearly good with figures and financial matters. A revolution in communications, first with the telegraph and then the telephone, meant that, from around 1850 to the outbreak of World War I, the City was the economic heart of the world, and London’s Stock Exchange comfortably the biggest and most important. In 1850 the largest group of securities had been the government’s British Funds, but the Exchange expanded so rapidly that, while they retained their value, their proportion of the whole market fell from 70 per cent to 9 per cent. From 1880 onwards the largest single category was railway stocks, many American, which by 1913 had risen to 38 per cent of a much larger whole. Members of the London Stock Exchange made a vital contribution to the functioning of international and national markets. They helped encourage enterprise by acting as the central agents in a securities market that brought together potential investors and businesses needing to raise capital, while the international market formed an important safety valve against economic instability at home. They had long taken great pride in their ability to regulate themselves, as indicated by their motto Dictum Meum Pactum (My word is my bond). Yet the organisation Lucas joined was at a crossroads in its history. In 1867 the Council of the Stock Exchange authorised the raising of loans to finance a railway in the Central American republic of Honduras, which the most elementary enquiries would have shown to be hopelessly unsound. It was this ‘dishonesty magnificent in its proportions’ that inspired Anthony Trollope’s wonderful novel The Way We Live Now , which described the rise and fall of the shady financier Augustus Melmotte. The outcome of the scandal was a Royal Commission into the Stock Exchange, whose report in 1878 gave a detailed and reliable account of the workings of the Exchange. It described a flourishing and prosperous 69 61 Details of Lucas’s Stock Exchange career taken from List of Members of the Stock Exchange, 1884-1924, and from Kelly’s London directories. Background on Stock Exchange from: Michie, R.C., The London and New York Stock Exchanges: 1850-1914 , Allen and Unwin, 1987 and from Reader, W.J., A House in the City: A Study of the City & the Stock Exchange based on the records of Foster and Braithwaite 1825-1975 , B.T.Batsford, 1980.