Lives in Cricket No 13 - AP Lucas

Introduction In the short story A Long-Ago Affair , 1 John Galsworthy’s landscape painter Herbert Marsland returns in 1921 to a cricket ground where he played as a boy, and finds that it had been turned into a golf course: Thirty-nine years ago – his sixteenth birthday. How vividly he remembered his new pads! A.P.Lucas had played against them and only made thirty-two – one founded one’s style on A.P.Lucas in those days – feet in front of the bat, and pointed a little forward, elegant; you never saw it now, and a good thing too – one could sacrifice too much for style! Still, the tendency was all the other way; style was too much ‘off’, perhaps! Galsworthy, a great cricket-lover, was the same age as his character, and Alfred Perry Lucas was one of his boyhood heroes. 2 His discussion of style was referring to far more than cricket, but it may explain why Lucas has to some extent been forgotten: though regarded by his contemporaries as among the finest of defensive batsmen, his strengths perhaps went out of fashion. Lucas was educated at Uppingham School in Rutland, where his cricket coach was the old Surrey player H.H.Stephenson, who was appointed in 1872. The influence of Stephenson was immediate and lasting. When he arrived, the exceptionally gifted C.E.Green had been the only Uppingham man to play first-class cricket, but within five years the powerful Cambridge University team contained five of them – the highest number ever provided by a single school. They were W.S.Patterson, H.T.Luddington, S.S.Schultz, D.Q.Steel and Lucas. All went on to play first-class cricket for other sides after university, but Stephenson regarded Lucas as ‘the best of all my boys’. At the end of his life he would mutter: ‘Yes, straight to meet her, middle of the bat, like those early boys of mine, who listened to what I said to them. Do you remember Lucas?’ And the pupil respected his teacher. His obituary in The Times recorded that ‘Mr Lucas had been carefully coached at Uppingham by H.H.Stephenson – he was by far the best of Stephenson’s pupils – and throughout his career he never tired of saying how much he owed to his teacher.’ Lucas was known to his friends as ‘Bunny’, which was quite a common nickname among public school boys. Its first recorded application to him 7 1 Caravan: The Collected Stories of John Galsworthy, Heinemann, 1925, p 687. 2 Marrot, H.V., The Life and Letters of John Galsworthy , Heinemann, 1935, p 35.