Lives in Cricket No 13 - AP Lucas

I have traced no photo of Bessie Lucas, and she remains a rather elusive figure. She was present at Bunny’s death, although curiously it took her eight days to report it and newspaper accounts of the funeral do not mention that she was there. In his will dated 1904, he left her a fixed sum of £500 and most of his personal belongings. As they had no children, he made provision for the proceeds from the residue of his estate to be converted into a trust fund for her, although sadly that only amounted to the £500 plus about £330 for his furniture. She outlived him by almost thirty years, dying at Southsea on 7 February 1953, aged 93. She or the family requested no flowers but donations to the relief fund for the floods that had devastated the east coast in the previous few days. 64 Her will shows that she invested the £830 left to her by Bunny in securities, and managed to live off other income, so that she more than carried out his wishes and bequeathed some £3,000 to the surviving children of Bunny’s disgraced brother, Percy. The executor of her will was John Francis Whitfeld, son of Herbert, the best man at her wedding to Bunny almost seventy years earlier. In 1904 came the most improbable, and in some ways farcical, episode of Lucas’s life, when this devout churchman and all-round good egg was cited as co-respondent in the divorce case of Charles Pattrick v Fanny Marie Louise Pattrick and Alfred Perry Lucas. 65 Charles Pattrick was born in 1862 at Thorpe-le-Soken in Essex, where his grandfather had been the miller. 66 By 1871 his parents had separated and his mother was living with their five children ‘on allowance from husband’, a commercial traveller staying with his widowed mother who was ‘living on interest’. Charles’ father later described himself as a merchant and evidently there was some wealth in the family, although socially they were below the Lucases in the Victorian pecking-order. Fanny Wardroper was born in France in 1869, the daughter of a British army captain, and in 1888 married Charles, who was then a commercial clerk with a gas company. He had become a gas engineer by 1901, when he and Fanny were living in the respectable Essex suburb of Ilford with four children and two domestic servants. On 17 May 1904 in the Family, Probate and Admiralty Division of the High Court – popularly known as ‘wives, wills and wrecks’ – Charles petitioned for a divorce from Fanny, with damages and custody of the children. He ‘had been informed that during the years 1900, 1901, 1902, 1903 and 1904, my said wife frequently travelled with Alfred Perry Lucas, the co-respondent, in a railway carriage on the Great Eastern Railway between Liverpool Street and Chelmsford and on divers occasions committed adultery with the said Alfred Perry Lucas.’ The man and the cricketer 77 64 The Times , 11 February 1953. 65 The National Archive J 77/818/4857. 66 Information about the Pattrick family chiefly from censuses.