James Lucas was the fifth son in the very large Quaker family of Rudd Lucas and Sarah Lawrence. He was born in 1780 in Hitchin,Hertfordshire and at a young age he went to London to work with his uncle, Joseph Lucas, in the whaling business. It is difficult to get the complete picture but there are a few snippets of information available.

James Lucas was the only member of the family to actually go to sea.  His first voyage to the South Seas would have been as as a very young boy an apprentice, the second as a harpooner on the ship Barbara, and finally as the Master, or Captain, of the Richard and Mary.

In 1807, three months after James Lucas returned from his extended voyage to the South Seas, his uncle and benefactor, Joseph Lucas died. James Lucas never went to sea again, and two years later was married to Mary Ann Green.

James Lucas and Mary Ann Green

In 1809 James married Mary Ann Green, the daughter of Richard and Ann Catherine Green, of Hackney, on 28 September 1809 at St. Margaret’s, Westminster. The date and location is from the Lucas Book, but I should be able to get an image of the registration from the Ancestry.co.uk database.

Virtually nothing is known about her except for a few snippets from the rather flowery reminiscences of her daughter, Anna Eliza Whidborne. She said that Mary Ann Green’s parents died when she was young and that she was raised by an uncle and an aunt.  Also a quote from Anna Eliza’s reminiscences as follows:  “The only thing I ever heard of her girlhood was that once she had expressed a desire for some object and her aunt said “Well my dear, if you want it, you ought to have it, for all belongs to you!”.   So there are a few clues to follow up on… it would seem that Mary Ann Green had been left some money by her deceased parents.  Unfortunately I’ve not been able to find a will yet, but I’m sure I haven’t exhausted all the possibilities.  Also, not a clue as to who the uncle and aunt were, and which side of her parent’s family they were from.

For the next few years James seems to have had a complete about face in his life. It is possible to track their whereabouts by the birth of their children. Their first daughter, Eliza Mary, was born one year later on the 26th October, 1810, in Enfield. [Check up on the source of this information.  She wasn’t christened until 1812 so there are a lot of discrepancies to sort out.] Two years later Maria was born in Camberwell, and two years after that, in 1814, Mary Ann was born in Stotfold.

Stotfold, Bedfordshire, is about 7 or 8 km northeast of Hitchin, the ancestral home of all the Lucases, but why he ended up there and not Hitchin is a mystery!   So far I haven’t been able to find any documentation on where he lived in Stotfold, so that is a project in itself.  They did stay there for a number of years though, right up to 1821 when their sixth daughter (yes!) was born.  It isn’t known what James did during these years in Stotfold except perhaps play the life of the country gentleman.

Move to Deptford

Sometime after 1821 the family moved back to London, to Deptford. [check the timing of this as it may have been related to the death of his elder brother Joseph Lucas 1769-1821], and in 1823 their last child was born, the no doubt much longed for son, who received the great long name of James John Seymour Spencer Lucas.

Family Life of James Lucas

So in the end James and Mary Ann had a family of five daughters, followed in the end James John Seymour Spencer (J.J.S.S.) Lucas. Of the daughters, the eldest was in her fifties when she married a man considerably older than herself, the second married into the Whidborne family, and the remaining three daughters never married. The only son, J.J.S.S. Lucas, also never married and I sometimes wonder if there is a story there but at this point it is almost impossible to find out.  Out of his six living children, only one daughter, Rosa, married and produced offspring, thus concentrating the wealth

James’ wife Mary Ann died in 1825 at age 43 leaving a very young family without a mother. The eldest of the six children was 15 years old. James died at Westbury on Trym, Gloucester in 1839 and according to the Lucas Book was buried at Chapman’s Independent Chapel in Greenwich.  This is most likely Greenwich Road Chapel.

All the children were christened at St. Paul’s, Deptford, but James was buried at the Independent Chapel. Why? Also, where was his wife Mary Ann buried?  Haven’t found that out yet.  Was James a member of the Independent Chapel because of his non-conformist Quaker background?   But did “Chapel” and the Quakers have much in common other than non-conformity? All mysteries to clear up.

The unmarried daughters and James lived the bulk of their lives at Burfield Priory, Westbury on Trym, a village near Bristol. How and why they ended up there is a mystery. In 1839  James died at Bristol Hot Wells which is in the same area, but how the family came to have any connection to Bristol is a mystery.

At some point Burfield Priory must have been sold, and the remaining sisters moved to Torquay, the home of the Whidborne family.

I always wonder about James’ life. Apparently he went to sea at least once or twice before he was married, but what then?  What did he do for the rest of his life? The whaling business pretty well ended, but he parlayed his share of the estate into something much bigger than it had started out as, so what, exactly, did he do during the time he and his wife were raising their family?

If you go by where the children were born there are a few clues. The first two were born in London, in 1810 in Enfield, and in 1812 in Camberwell. The next four children were born in Stotfold, Bedfordshire, which is not very far from Hitchin, Hertfordshire, where James himself was born. So this makes it look like the family was based in London for the first few years after Joseph Lucas died and the whaling business was winding down. Then for some reason he took the family back up to the area he grew up in himself for a few years. Did he have some kind of business there, or was he just playing the gentleman?