Lives in Cricket No 13 - AP Lucas

Lucas wasn’t just roped in for his cricket, and went out with the Essex Hunt, whose official historian recalled a hunt in 1889 in which Lucas took part: ‘… we came over a very rough country. Running by Menagerie Wood, through Navestock and on to Dudbrook, pulling our fox down in a covert close to Navestock Heath; one hour and thirty minutes, most of it very fast … .’ 73 In his will, dated 1904, Lucas left to his wife ‘all my horses carriages saddlery harness stable furniture tools and utensils’, so evidently he retained the accoutrements of a country gentleman. Throughout the 1890s Lucas captained the Chelmsford club, which improved ‘mainly through the efforts of its captain ... who has always taken a great interest in its welfare.’ … [He] ‘raised the club to one of the best in the county from one of very modest pretensions.’ 74 Its ground was owned by Henry Frank Johnson, Bishop of Colchester, who was rector of Chelmsford when Lucas served as a churchwarden there. In 1893, the club won 14 games, drew four and lost just one. Lucas headed the batting averages with 570 runs at 63.33, and also took 30 wickets at 17.90. In August the club had an annual cricket festival at which, in 1893, Mr Lucas’s eleven included his Essex colleagues Hugh Owen and Henry Taberer, and his Rovers chum Hugh Rotherham. In a two-day, two-innings match, Lucas scored 31 and 47 not out in a comfortable win against the Free Foresters. He later moved to the Brentwood club, which played and still plays at the Old County Ground. Among his team-mates there were Essex players Charles Kortright, Frederick Fane and Arnold Holcombe Read, father of ‘Hopper’, who had a brief but explosive career for Essex and England in the mid-1930s. The batsman Lucas’s obituary in The Times summarised his style 75 : Mr. Lucas was in the truest sense of the word a classic batsman. A master of both back and forward play, he represented the strictest orthodoxy. No doubt if he had allowed himself a little licence he might have made more runs, but his method served him so well that right into middle age he kept up his form. It may fairly be said of him that no defensive batsman of any generation was better worth looking at. He played the ball so hard and his style was so irreproachable that one could watch him for hours without a moment of weariness … . Two days after Lucas’s Times obituary appeared, in a letter the Rev Dr Edward Lyttelton, a colleague of Lucas in the great Cambridge University teams of the late 1870s wrote: The man and the cricketer 81 73 Yerburgh, H.Beauchamp, Leaves from a Hunting Diary in Essex: Volume II , Vinton, 1900, p 177 . 74 Victoria History of the County of Essex: Volume 2 , Constable, 1907, p 609. 75 16 Oct 1923. It was reprinted near enough word for word in Wisden whose editor, Sydney Pardon, appended his initials so was almost certainly the author.