Blogetty Blog 16: Times of Trouble.

Astrology, historically reputed as serious science, has largely declined in modern regard. If anyone besides Oedipus ever had reason to bewail the slings and arrows of his outrageous fortune it was James Jonathan Hughes Delight Lucas, my great-great grandfather.     

Unfortunately when I was a young man I lacked sufficient curiosity or close contact with my uncle Joe to press him for his knowledge of the voluminous business and personal records he guarded in the library at Warnham Court, our family estate in Sussex.

Joe was forced to leave Warnham Court by WWII – when it was requisitioned by the army ‘for the duration’ – and move to Broomhall, a large house on his estate, and he never returned. When the war ended he could no longer afford the enormous upkeep on Warnham Court, so the house and gardens were sold for a pittance to London County Council as a home for children suffering bronchial complaints.

In the sad postwar days there was no market for large country houses and they were abandoned in hundreds for demolition or eventual redevelopment when times improved. Britain was exhausted by her war effort and ‘broke’.

Today the cost of a condo apartment in Warnham Court approaches £1,000,0000 and numerous high-price homes scatter the former gardens. Tragically the Lucas records were all destroyed at Joe’s death by my cousins Joan and Charles: having nowhere to store them in their own homes they built a bonfire and burned them. It is thanks to my cousin Loti Irwin that we know much of what survives.

James Jonathan Hughes Delight Lucas (1792-1865) was the first child of James Delight Lucas and Elizabeth Hughes. He can only be described as ill-starred. He had four sisters one of whom one died as a baby and another as a child. Far worse, both his parents died of unknown cause when he was 9 and he was taken into the care of his uncle Thomas Hughes along with his three surviving siblings. London was a villainous insanitary sink subject to recurrent fevers and dense choking fogs resulting from a pall of coal smoke where life expectancy was short.

JJHDL was twenty when he married Elizabeth Pearman and she was twenty two. He was his father’s principle heir; the will survives but does not reveal the extent of the estate. When he came of age, and perhaps with his uncles’ help, the inheritance was adequate to set himself up as a small builder. By 1822 they were living at Compo Cottage St. Marylebone where he had his business yard.

 Their first child James Pearman Lucas was born on July 15^th 1815. Next came: Anne Marie in 1817; Charles Thomas (CTL) born 1820; Thomas (TL) born 1822; followed by George, Kate and their last child, Alfred, born 1829. This robust family did not last for long. James Pearman died aged 20, possibly of Tuberculosis. As did George, aged 20; Kate who died at 18 and Alfred at age 12. The loss of four of his children at young ages was particularly bitter to JJHDL in view of his own sad experience of childhood.

 Anne Marie, or “Great Aunt Anne” as she was known, did not marry and later in life went to live in Sussex with her younger brother Charles Thomas, at his Warnham Court estate. She died in 1892 and is buried in the village Church. I remember as a child that there was considerable concern when the family crypt was flooded by a blocked drain, and she was found drifting about in her coffin after floating off her shelf.

Despite his appeal about liability, the Church Trustees took a hard line: they had had recent expensive problems over repairs to the elaborate bell tower and were short of funds themselves. Whatever the reasons, they sought damages. JJHDL’s business effects were put up for sale at auction and the circumstances of his family living at Compo Cottage were seriously threatened.

The advertisement for the sale of his business and personal property read: “Two Days’ Sale. Cromer-street, Judd-street, Brunswick Square near the new road St. Pancras. Building materials, Horse Cart, Household furniture and other effects of Mr. James Lucas, builder, a bankrupt – by JOHN HIND, on the premises, Cromer Street. The Furniture &c, THIS DAY, Dec 21, at 11.

The Stock consists of 300 scaffold poles, 400 ditto boards, 300 putlogs, bases and caps, useful Portland, York and marble, bricks, bats, and tiles, a quantity of new deals, some boards and useful materials, cast iron girder, a few lots of ironmongery, and useful iron, ladders, steps, scaffold boards, work benches, plaster ornaments, busts, figures, flowers, &c; paints, brushes and pots.” (Putlogs are the short horizontal timbers on which scaffold boards are laid.)

“The second day’s sale will comprise bedsteads, furniture, feather beds, mattresses and bedding, mahogany drawers, ditto secretaries, ditto chairs and tables, basin stands, carpets, hearth rug, chimney, pier, and dressing glasses, oil cloths, window curtains, pictures, china, glass, crockery, and the usual assortment of bed chamber and kitchen furniture. Catalogues on the premises of Messrs. Sheffield and Sons, solicitors to the commission, Great Prescott Street.”

Fortunately, subsequent press cuttings show the sale did not take place. JJHDL found a way to reach an accommodation with his creditors and so was not obliged to move his family after the setback. In the following April and May notices appeared in the Morning Chronicle advertising meetings at the Court of Commissioners of Bankruptcy regarding payment of dividends on his debt.

JJHDL had escaped imprisonment – this was not a good time to be convicted as a debtor – and continued in business with a builder/developer named Samuel Emsley, who perhaps participated in his rescue with another guarantor named Henry Warburton. Some of the seventy houses they built in in Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk streets in Bethnal Green survive today. They went on to develop the neighboring Jarvis estate constructing over 100 houses between 1845 and 1855.

So to some extent fate eventually relented. JJHDL lived to be 73 and to see the astonishing commercial success of Lucas Brothers, the construction company established by his sons CTL and TL. They built an imposing tomb for him and their mother in Highgate Cemetery. Requiescant in Pace.

*****

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