JOHN LUCAS, WHERE ART THOU?
Early last year I embarked on a local history pilgrimage.
I caught the 7.08 train from Carnforth to Leeds, planning to visit the grave of Warton’s earliest known local historian, the school- master John Lucas. His history of Warton Parish was written between 1710 and 1750, and I’d been re-reading it with a view to publishing a new edition and perhaps writing a brief, biographical introduction. Along the way, I’d become steeped in his arcane and laborious writing style which is – mercifully – often relieved by fascinating insights into eighteenth century village life: like the lively annual village football match and the elaborate rushbearing ceremony at St Oswalds.
The Leeds train rattled through Borwick and Arkholme, stopping at Wennington and Bentham, before climbing up on to the Pennines at Clapham. The young John Lucas, I reflected, must have followed a similar route – though on horseback rather than by train — when he first moved from Warton to Leeds. As we pulled out of Long Preston I mused on the graceful homage I might pay the historian whom all Mourholme members must regard as their patron saint. By Skipton I’d decided to buy two roses – one red and one white – to lay on his grave in recognition of a life begun in a north Lancashire village but lived and concluded in the boisterous metropolis of Leeds. It was a touching scene I rehearsed in my mind’s eye: two local historians communing down the centuries. This poetic fancy would shortly suffer a rude awakening.
If there is a florist shop between Leeds railway station and my eventual destination, the Church of St John the Evangelist, I failed to find it. As it turned out, it was probably just as well. Brushing past the commuters on Boar Lane, I scaled Briggate, crossed the Headrow with its smart shops and eateries, and entered the churchyard through a splendid lych gate. And there it was in all its seventeenth century glory: the oldest church in Leeds; the place where John Lucas had worshipped for the last 25 years of his life.
The charity school where he taught is now the site of a rather good café in the corner of the church yard (I can recommend the flapjack). This was the centre of John Lucas’s world: his workplace, the parish where he served as church warden, where he rubbed shoulders with the great and the good of Leeds and the plot where he was laid to rest, aged 66, in 1750 alongside his wife Elizabeth, who had died at 41, having borne him seven children. It’s a fine place to be buried. Very few churches were built in the troubled reign of Charles 1. With its plaster ceilings decorated like a wedding cake and its richly carved, dark, glossy oak pews, St John’s is a rare gem and well worth a visit. But I was not here to celebrate church architecture. I had a mission: locate and venerate. I began to look for the grave of Warton’s John Lucas.
There is a quintessential English pleasure to be had in randomly deciphering the lives of long-dead yeomen from lichen-covered gravestones to a soundtrack of buzzing bees. But this was Leeds in March and mine was a more dour and deliberate process. Less comfortable too. The memorials in St John’s graveyard are not uprights, but horizontal ledgerstones, laid edge to edge in a stony patchwork. Much bending and squinting followed. No matter. I was confident of finding him. He was here, I knew, because I had it on the authority of a later local historian, Mr J Rawlinson Ford of Yealand: the patient scholar who co-edited and published the 1931 abridgement of Lucas’s massive tome.
“He was buried in the Churchyard of St John’s Church in Leeds, where…there is a tombstone to his memory”, writes Rawlinson Ford, unequivocally, in an appendix to the book. He helpfully adds details of the Latin inscription I should look out for: Vita labore perfunctus huc accessit – A life of labour over, he came here. Simple.
And sure enough, at the tower end of the church I found John Lucas. But hold on a minute, the dates were all wrong. This wasn’t our John Lucas. It was some other worthy with the same name. OK, so our man must be down the other side. Except he wasn’t. I examined every legible stone. Not a trace of our Lucas and his clan. What was going on? I chewed over the mystery along with a slice of excellent flapjack in the cafe next to the church. Was I in the right churchyard? Yes, definitely. What was I missing?
Naturally, I raised the issue with the helpful volunteers at St John’s, which is no longer a working church so much as a lovely historic building in the care of the Church Conservation Trust. I wasn’t entirely surprised that they hadn’t heard of John Lucas. Although he’d lived on their patch, he is of much greater importance to Warton than to Leeds. The only possible clue they could offer was that there had been some “improvements” and “landscaping” around the church a few years back. Perhaps some monuments had been moved?
Back at home I fired off some emails: to the headquarters of the Church Conservation Trust; to the City Council, and to the Leeds Local history group, the Thoresby Society. But no-one could explain why a grave that had been there in the early 1930’s was apparently there no longer. The ‘landscaping’ and ‘improvements’ I’d heard about had been carried out in the adjacent memorial gardens, not the churchyard, I was told. The Council couldn’t help. And the Church Conservation Trust HQ wrote back saying they did not hold records for churches in their care.
I returned to my source. Re-reading Rawlinson Ford’s appendix to Lucas’s history, I noticed that he hadn’t actually visited the graveyard himself. Instead, he had relied upon the work of another 1930’s historian, Mr G D Lumb of Leeds, who had transcribed the details from John Lucas’s memorial. Mr Lumb, in fact, had transcribed the details from all the gravestones in St John’s churchyard and published them, in the proceedings of the Thoresby Society.
On my next visit to Leeds, friendly librarians at the magnificent Central Library steered me towards Mr Lumb’s work. His meticulous cataloguing clearly located the memorial to our John Lucas as lying not far from the main door to the church. But I still wasn’t able to find it. A further trip to the West Yorkshire Archive, which holds a Victorian map of the graves and a key to their owners, failed to shed more light on the mystery. There was – tantalisingly – a reference to a John Lucas (not my previous false-start) who was buried near the door. But he was listed as “John Lucas, merchant”. Was the schoolmaster a victim of clerical error? In any case, whatever the paperwork told me, I’d been unable to find our man’s memorial on the ground.
So this, for the moment, is the unsatisfactory state of affairs: John Lucas’s family memorial was there for all to see in the 1930’s, but I can’t find it eight decades later. I still think I’ve missed something. It will not end here. This is one of those irksome anomalies that nags at the brain. Sooner or later I’ll be back on the 7.08 from Carnforth to Leeds. I need answers … and possibly another piece of flapjack. But no roses. Not until I have somewhere to lay them.
Originally published in the Mourholme Magazine of Local History 2016, No.1, issue 69