by Arunabha Sengupta
In the spring of 1902 JM Barrie, author of Peter Pan, made a new friend. Mr and Mrs Barrie had dinner with this new friend and his wife at the Hewlett’s house in Northwick Terrace, just a couple of mighty hits from Lord’s. Later, Barrie wrote to the Cornish writer Arthur Quiller-Couch: “EV Lucas is the only man I’ve met of late years that I specifically took to.”
The reason was evident. Lucas, then working for Punch, had been born at Eltham in Kent before his family had moved to Brighton. And soon the young Lucas had become a member of the Sussex CCC and a devoted one. During his early twenties, Ranji and Fry had scored mountains of runs and the whole Lucas family, girls and boys, had frequented the Sussex county ground, talking about the cricketers as young folk now talk about pop stars.
Lucas started writing for Globe and then joined Punch. He was a prolific writer, dabbling in light essays, short stories, poetry, travel literature, several biographies and even plays. He told his daughter Audrey that he was a ‘bedroom author’, which meant any of his works could be put by the bedside of a very young girl or a very old lady, without causing any consternation.
This was said no doubt with some disdain for in private he was ‘a cynical clubman, liking to entertain with champagne and brandy, and discussing about politics and decadence of modern art.’ He also supposedly had an extensive collection of pornography.
However, he loved cricket. His collection of essays on the game, Cricket All His Life, was compiled and published after his death and they are delightful. John Arlott called the collection the best of all books on cricket. He also wrote fluent essays for The Cricketer and a charming book of studies of the forefathers of cricket The Hambledon Men. However, the value of the accounts are more in charm and literary quotient than research and uncovering of facts. It is essentially a stylish retelling of John Nyren.
Indeed, Lucas was known as a stylist with great flair, but he was not really the one for rigorous labour. As Frank Swinnerton observed, “Lucas had a great appetite for the curious, the human, and the ridiculous. If he were offered a story, an incident or an absurdity , his mind instantly shaped it with wit and form. He read a character with wisdom, and gravely turned it to fun. He versified a fancy, or concentrated in an anecdote or instance all that a vaguer mind might stagger for an hour to express. But his was the mind of a critic and a commentator; and the hideous sustained labour of the ambitious novelist was impossible to him.”
The same abstinence from labour kept him from being a serious historian of the game. However, when Peter Wynne-Thomas compiled his magisterial book Cricket’s Historians, Lucas did feature in two pages.
He obviously played for the Allahakhbarries. Contrary to the solid principles of the wandering cricket team, he was quite good. ‘A pretty bat and a good field’, it was said. And Barrie himself lamented in The Greenwood Hat “Lucas (unfortunately) has a style.”
In 1905, Lucas joined Conan Doyle and Andrew Lang in starting a fund for three poverty-stricken ladies. The said women happened to be granddaughters of John Nyren, author of The Young Cricketer’s Tutor.
In 1908, Lucas sent a piece to The Times voicing the same complaint that has plagued the rosy eyed cricket romantics down the ages: “Any step that can bring sentiment again into first-class cricket is to be welcomed: for a hard utilitarianism and commercialisation have far too long controlled it.” This was 1908 … bang in the middle of what would be known as The Golden Age of Cricket.
Exactly hundred years later, in 2008, in the T20 and IPL age, William Rees-Morg wrote in a similar vein in The Times, saying: “The culture of cricket now seems to be going the way of Troy, or indeed of the Roman Empire.”
Of all the writings of Lucas, this 1908 essay on cricket in The Times has not aged at all. Sentimentalists will continue to mouth the same thing another hundred years down the line.
EV Lucas was born on 11 June 1868.
Illustration: Maha