Lives in Cricket No 13 - AP Lucas

exceptionally good investment. 62 It also issued what appeared to be a prospectus, but included in small print the phrase ‘for information only’, which meant that the promoters could not be held to any statements made in it. It was one of a succession of companies set up to exploit the resources of some of the remoter parts of the British Empire, in this case the gold of the Klondike in Canada. The principal promoter was Herbert Hoover, the engineer and businessman who later became the United States president in the years of the Great Depression, but after two years the Corporation was $70,000 in debt and on 4 May 1917 went into ‘friendly receivership’. C.E.Green died on 4 December 1916, in the darkest days of the war. He was ill for some months and refused, when he knew he was dying, to see even Lucas, although on 17 November he did add a codicil to his will, leaving £500 to ‘my very dear old friend and associate for many years in the cricket field Alfred Perry Lucas … which I hope he will accept as a small token of my sincere affection and in memory of our many years friendship.’ He also left to ‘my dear old brother Major George Frederick Green [£1,300] which I believe to be the amount which he lost through his unfortunately giving up his underwriting at Lloyds at the time he did.’ Green did not mention Lucas in his original will made only three years earlier, so he may have made the similar bequest to him as a result of losses in the North-West Corporation affair. The Stock Exchange had been closed on 27 July 1914, as a result of the crisis that led to the outbreak of World War I. It did not reopen until January 1915 when Edward Arthur Crowley and Joseph Antoine Last, two experienced agents who had been working independently, became partners in A.P.Lucas and Co. In 1917 Lucas reverted to working on his own and for the next three years only his home in Ingatestone was listed, and no address in the City. Then in 1920, he again took an office in London, round the corner from Copthall Avenue at Drapers Gardens, later the site of the tallest building ever to be demolished in the City of London. By all accounts, he was stone deaf – perhaps a condition inherited from his mother, who was listed on the 1891 census as deaf. In his mid-60s, he would surely have been looking to retire from the Stock Exchange but the continued listing of him and his City office in directories suggests that he did not. On 12 October 1923 Lucas died suddenly at home of a heart attack, aged 66. For about seven years he had been suffering from angina, perhaps brought on by financial worries. When his will was proved two months later, his estate was valued at £5,490 gross but only £1,238 net. The equivalent figures in 2010 would be about £130,000 and £30,000, so it was a considerable difference. One explanation for this is that he lost heavily Stock Exchange agent, 1880-1923 72 62 Hamill, John, The Strange Career of Mr. Hoover Under Two Flags , William Faro Inc, 1931. This book is itself strange, a character assassination of Hoover by comparison with which The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail is a masterpiece of balanced historical analysis. Nevertheless the basic facts about the North-West Corporation seem accurate.