Lives in Cricket No 13 - AP Lucas

and Johnston, a corn merchant, had to earn a living and could not play cricket whenever they felt like it. Lucas headed the averages with 347 runs at 31.54, so will have been reasonably pleased with his own form, but not with that of his team, which won three, drew three and lost seven. Attendances were therefore very poor and the overall deficit was £2,500, about £150,000 today. In November 1892 an Extraordinary General Meeting was held at the Great Eastern Hotel, Liverpool Street. C.E.Green presided, and outlined ‘the very serious position in which the club was placed’. After much debate, Green’s motion that ‘ … steps be forthwith taken to wind up the Essex County Cricket Club’ found no seconder and ‘fell to the ground’. Eventually the money was found, chiefly from Green himself and the treasurer, C.M.Tebbut. 1893 Speaking at the 1893 annual meeting, Green seems to have viewed the prospects for the new season more in hope than expectation, his only positive grounds for optimism being Lucas’s continuing availability as captain. As usual, business commitments kept Lucas out of the first game of the season, in which Surrey beat Essex in two days and Green’s pessimism seemed justified. At Leyton against Leicestershire, Owen was due to continue deputising as captain but was taken ill, and Lucas arrived at lunch-time to find his team languishing on 102 for seven. Nos. 7 and 9, Walter Mead and Tom Russell, were already at the wicket. After lunch they added 54. Then Lucas, coming in at No.10, ‘hit in his very best form’ for 80 not out of 149 in 90 minutes with 11 fours. He added 66 with Mead, and ‘by spirited batting Mr Lucas and Pickett added 73 in 25 minutes’, so the ‘rate of run-getting at the end of the Essex innings was phenomenal’. Their eventual total of 295 nevertheless seemed less than adequate when Leicestershire had cruised to 147 for two, but the visitors then lost their last eight wickets for 31 and were bowled out again for 56, giving Essex an improbable win by an innings and 61 runs. On the scheduled last day of this match, an interview with Lucas was published as one of the Chats on Cricket Field . With little evidence but considerable optimism and prescience, he declared: ‘I am glad, bye the bye, to think that Essex seems likely to turn the corner this year, so far as cricket is concerned.’ Cricket, that great leveller, ensured that in the very next game Lucas – immediately after telling The Cricket Field that he had only ever had one ‘pair of spectacles’ – got his second, in a ten-wicket defeat by Yorkshire. Then in the return at Leicester, batting in his normal position of No.3, he made only 22 and one as Essex lost by eight wickets. Even by Essex standards it was a roller-coaster of a season. Hampshire reached 150 for three and then ‘there followed the most peculiar collapse ever seen on the County Ground’. Lucas brought back Kortright, who 94 Essex captain, 1889-1894