Benjamin Lucraft

Benjamin Lucraft (28 November 1809 – 25 September 1897) was a famous craftsman chair-carver in London where his radical inclinations led him to be involved in many political movements.

Lucraft was a public advocate of Chartism and a founder member, and sometime chairman, of the "General Council of First International" of the International Workingmen's Association. He was the only working-class man elected to the first London School Board in 1870 where he campaigned for free education for all, among other issues. He was a member, or officer, in a wide number of radical political movements of the 19th century.

In 1874 he stood for election in Finsbury and in 1880 for Tower Hamlets; in both elections he was unsuccessful but was one of the forerunners of the Lib-Lab candidates who had their first electoral success in 1874. He died in 1897.

Early life

Benjamin Lucraft's family had settled in Broadclyst, Devon, in 1781 when his grandfather William Lucraft married Esther Newton in the parish church on 10 December 1781. Esther was the daughter of William Newton and Esther Leight, both Broadclyst families
and Esther's grave still stands in the churchyard after her death in 1831, aged 71. The family had moved from the South Hams area of Devon in the 17th century.

Lucraft was born on 28 November 1809, in Exeter, the second son of Lucraft and his wife Mary. His father Benjamin came from Broadclyst where he been a wood worker and possibly a chair-carver. Lucraft was baptised at St. Paul church Exeter on 16 December 1809.

In 1819 around the age of 10 Lucraft was apprenticed in husbandry to his grandfather William according to his apprentice indenture. Some sources suggest that he was a ploughboy and was apprenticed in cabinet making at 14 years. The only story from this time is that he was later in life described as a boy reading the newspaper to his adult working colleagues on the farms where they worked.

Taunton to London

By 1830 Lucraft was living with his parents in Taunton in a house on North Street, and later on East Leech Street. Either his father or he himself worked as a cabinet maker at a workshop on the east side of High Street where he paid a rate of £7.10s 0d, qualifying for a vote. Lucraft and his family were cabinet makers and were also listed at High Street in 1830. While they were there the Poor relief gave his father 1s 1d in January 1830 and 1s 7d in February 1830 from the ''Poor Rate'' for buying stock.

Lucraft married Mary Pearce, whose family also lived on East Leech, in St. Mary Magdalene Parish Church, Taunton, on 24 December 1830. When Mary and Lucraft had their first child they named him George Seely (sic) Lucraft. He was baptised at St. Mary's on 3 November 1831.

Their second child died in 1832 and in January 1834 Lucraft, Mary and their son moved to Shoreditch in London, with Lucraft as a chair-carver, bringing with them his mother Mary who is recorded in the London census of 1841 as employing a man and a boy.

Lucraft lived with his mother at Mill Row, off Kingsland Road, as he raised his family and began to make a reputation as a draughtsman and carver.

In the 1850s Lucraft’s wife Mary died aged about 52. On 27 June 1858 Lucraft married again at the Register Office in the Strand. He married Mary Ann Adelaide Hitchin, spinster daughter of William and Mary Hitchin. She was living at 5 Lyons Inn and she said her father was a jeweller.

Chairmaker

Lucraft became one of the most famous chair-carvers of his generation and stayed at this trade until well past retiring age, turning out chairs which were admired at many exhibitions.

His son, George Seely Lucraft, set up the company G S Lucraft and Co Ltd. on City Road in London and employed his father as a chair-carver. This arrangement gave Lucraft the freedom to follow his political career. George Seely Lucraft followed his father in the furniture trade and was also active in radical politics, among other things being the chairman of the committee to promote the Labour candidate for the London School Board in succession to his father in 1890. George later was active in Liberal-Labour politics, being the agent for a London borough.

The company designed and sold a range of furniture and supplied the well-known retailers such as Maples, Robert Gillow and Heals (department store). It was not the English custom to always sign work and so it is not possible to find many identifiable examples of his work.

On one occasion Queen Victoria attended an exhibition and admired one of his chairs, commenting to him in person about their excellence. There is one domestic chair known to have been made by him in the possession of a descendant.

A chair was made by Lucraft at the request of the Liberal Party (UK) when they wished to honour William Ewart Gladstone. It was presented to Gladstone by the liberals of the Borough of Greenwich and the Liberal Club of the neighbourhood on 17 August 1881. After some years research the chair was found again in a corner of the library at Hawarden Castle (18th century): the North Wales home of Gladstone. One of Lucraft's great great grandsons, Jack Edmonds Lucraft, arranged for it to be restored as it was in a very bedraggled condition. The irony is that the cabinet-maker made a chair for the Prime Minister who gave working men the vote after a time when the cabinet-maker had himself been called in parliament a "cabinet-breaker".

Temperance

Lucraft's obituary in the ''Hackney Gazette'' records him as a total abstainer from alcohol after 1846. Abstinence, Teetotalism or Temperance, was a religious and political movement in the 19th century as working men and women organised into support groups and movements to promote abstinence and to support each other after they had "taken the pledge".

George Howell, the political activist and commentator, remembered that he worked closely with Lucraft in temperance work in 1856 and 1857. The members of local temperance groups formed themselves into Circuits, along the lines of Methodism, and speakers travelled from one group to another speaking and promoting the issues.

Soon after becoming a teetotaler in 1846 Lucraft also signed the declaration of the London Temperance Charter Association. This declared that the signatories would not drink any intoxicating drinks until the People's Charter, the foundation tenets of Chartism, became the law of the land.

From the late 1840s to the late 1850s the Temperance Movement seems to have been one of Lucraft's main political activities and he is reported in 1858 as being the treasurer of the London Temperance Charter Association. He is also noted at a meeting he arranged of this group on Sunday 10 January in the Star Coffee House at 33 Polden Lane, Barbican, and he is noted as also arranging the meeting for the next week.

After his election to the London School Board in 1870 Lucraft was one of the working men selected to meet Lord Kimberley to express their support for the government's proposed legislation on the sale of alcohol which was then being debated.

The next flurry of reported temperance actions comes when Lucraft is standing for election to parliament for the constituency of Tower Hamlets in 1879. He and his agents, including Mr Dyer, are drumming up support for Lucraft, and the temperance movement is one network they lobby hard to gain votes. Much of the evidence for this is recorded in the National League Journal, which is the publication of Josephine Butler's movement for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts.

In April 1879 he is reported as being the President of a "flourishing" branch of the Band of Hope Union in London. In one letter to the electors he says:

..with respect to the important question of temperance, and the licensing laws, I would support the placing of a legal power of restraining the issue or renewal of licences, in the hands of the inhabitants themselves, by some efficient measure of local option.

One report of his election platform in 1879 says that he stands "as a temperance, repeal, and working men's candidate." In March 1880 the Friends Association Report (the Quakers) reports that Lucraft was well supported among non-conformist and temperance voters.

Then towards the end of his life he was still active in the movement. In 1896 he was at a well-reported and famous meeting of Octogenarian Teetotallers in St Martin's Hall, London. There were over forty 80-year-olds present and around 200 had actually been traced with 152 providing questionnaire answers about their lifestyle.

A few months later in November 1896 Lucraft celebrated 50 years as a total abstainer, at a party where he was surrounded by his children, grandchildren and great grand children. This significant achievement in his life was reported in the Hackney Gazette.

At his funeral just under a year later in 1897 the minister reported that as well as from every other walk of his life, there were representatives of the temperance movement at his grave-side.

Lucraft's report on the Paris Universal Exhibition

Lucraft's prowess with the chisel, and his campaigning for the improvement of the education of apprentices, led him to be asked by the Royal Society of Arts to attend the Paris Universal Exhibition Exposition Universelle (1878), and report on his findings in respect of the training of workers in the furniture trade.

He found matters far better arranged in France for the production of quality furniture and proposed wholesale changes to the apprentice system, many of which were later adopted. He was anxious that draughtsmanship should be a part of the training, as he himself always drew out his own work, and felt men were disadvantaged in their skills if they could not do the whole piece as a craftsman. He proposed the idea of a school or college for the furniture trade apprentices and this idea eventually became the London School of Furniture, now part of London Metrolitan University. He proposed and worked towards the establishment of a museum in East London of craft work, skills and tools that would enable the working man to see how trades were worked in other times and places.

A copy of the report sits in the bookcase which was presented to him on his re-election to the London School Board in 1873. The inscription on the bookcase reads:

This bookcase and books were presented to Mr Benjamin Lucraft, the only workman member of the first School Board for London, on his re-election in 1873, by his Committee and Supporters, as a mark of their esteem, and in recognition of services rendered by him to the cause of popular education.

Working men’s exhibitions

Lucraft worked with others to bring into being the working men's exhibitions he sought, perhaps as a counterbalance to the grandeur and exclusivity of the Great Exhibition which he had witnessed. The First Working Men's Exhibition in the Agricultural Hall was in 1865 and George Howell records that Benjamin was one of the promoters.

Benjamin was on the Management Committee for the first exhibition where he donated £10 and exhibited some furniture – perhaps a chair of his or some work from the company. At the second he was on the Council of the Exhibition which secured substantial contributions.

Political life

Lucraft had taken an interest in political reform which would benefit the situation of the working classes. Through the middle years of the 19th century there were myriad organisations which campaigned across a whole range of issues. Lucraft was active in a large number of these organisations, often taking office in them and representing their interests, both in London and abroad.

During these years it is often possible from newspaper records to say where he was speaking at or chairing meetings on three, four or five evenings a month and probably more besides those reported in the press.

One document says Lucraft joined Attwood's Political Union in 1829, before he came to London.

Lucraft became the secretary and most prominent member of the North London Political Union, a Chartist group which met in Islington and which George Howell attended. He was a speaker on the circuit of the Wheatsheaf Yard Temperance Society organised, by Howell on the Wesleyan model, which lectured all over London. Dyer also records Lucraft's active membership, from 1850, of Richard Cobden's Parliamentary and Financial Reform Association.

In the spring of 1848 Feargus O'Connor decided on a new strategy that would combine several different tactics: a large public meeting, a procession and the presentation of a petition to the House of Commons. O'Connor organised the meeting to take place at Kennington Common on Monday, 10 April 1848. Lucraft was reported to have been at the great demonstration, which was the strongest meeting of supporters of the Chartist Movement.

Lucraft ended his life close to James Bronterre O'Brien, the leader of the Chartists, as they are both buried in Abney Park Cemetery north of Kingsland Road where Benjamin spent his working life.

George Howell wrote a handwritten note about Lucraft's life and activities which survived in the papers of the Bishopsgate Institute and is re-produced here:

"Mr Lucraft may be described as almost the last surviving link between the old Chartist movements prior to 1850, and the newer political movements which grew out of the Chartist agitation towards the end of the fifties and onward until the Reform Act of 1884. Lucraft was one of the earliest I heard speak after coming to London, Mr Ernest Jones being the first as already stated. Often and often have I stood by Lucraft in what was then known as the Copenhagen Fields, and also in a meeting place in Chapel Street Islington. I became more closely associated with Mr Lucraft in Temperance work in 1856 and 1857, from which dates we have been old friends and close associates. He was among the first members of the Reform League and was a member of the Council and the Executive from the first. He was never a very effective speaker, but he was able always to put his points forcibly, because he knew what he wanted and could see tolerably clearly the way in which it could be obtained. In his earlier days he was thought to be an implacable Chartist, and nothing else; but he was not the man to oppose reform because all that he desired was not granted. Lucraft was sternly devoted to "principles", but he acknowledged the value of compromise when it was a question of something or nothing. He was unswerving in his advocacy of chartism and teetotalism. From 1850 to 1860 he was one of the few that kept the lingering embers of the chartist movement alive, by blowing it, so that if it did not light up very much you could still see the sparks, and feel some of its warmth. Next to chartism pure and simple, that is "the six points", he was an ardent advocate of Land Law Reform and of Technical Education, and was one of the promoters of, and exhibitors at the first Workman's Exhibition in the Agricultural Hall in 186_ (sic).

After the dissolution of the Reform League in 1869, Lucraft became an ardent advocate of the Education policy of the National Education League, and was rewarded by being selected as on eof the candidates for, and duly elected as one of the Members of the London School Board for the Division in which he had always lived – the old Borough of Finsbury. The excellence of his work on the School Board for London is now admitted by everybody. He especially left his mark in connection with the questions of Technical Education, and the use of London Charities. Although strongly in favour of a purely secular system of education, he was a staunch supporter of the compromise arrived at in the earlier history of the Board. Mr Lucraft always took an independent view, and would not become a mere party man in all occasions.

The other question was the substitution of Arbitration in lieu of war, a Peace Policy for all nations. He was one of the first members of the Workman's Peace Association, and was for some years its chairman. Lucraft was a true and loyal colleague, in council and out of it. He would never condescend to be in cliques, though his good nature sometimes was used for such purposes. But as soon as he saw the drift he manfully resumed his independent attitude. His regularity and punctuality were proverbial. Lucraft was at his post. In the open air, at meetings, or in the Committee Room, he was on duty. I think he loved speaking for its own sake, and yet he could sit quietly and record his vote if silence was thought to be best. But "in the Park", or in Trafalgar Square, or on his own more familiar ground – Clerkenwell Green – Lucraft was always to the front, and I must add was always welcome. Lucraft was much respected for his high character in the Borough in which he lived, which was testified again and again by his repeated re-elections to the School Board for London."

Political Reform League

The last Chartist conference opened in London on Monday 8 February 1858, and Lucraft shared the chair with Alderman Thomas Livesey of Rochdale. The outcome was the formation of the Political Reform League (or Union) with a programme of:

*manhood suffrage
*the ballot
*triennial parliaments
*equal electoral districts
*abolish property qualifications

The league was active throughout 1859 and its work encouraged the establishment of Manhood Suffrage Associations throughout the country, of which the North London Union was one.

Lucraft came to prominence in London working-class politics with former Chartists like himself – Robert Hartwell and J.B. Leno among them – he was an important bridge figure between the radical movements of the Chartist period and the Reform League of the eighteen sixties. One political commentator says that "as much as anyone in these early years of the revival of the political reform movement, Benjamin helped to impress upon the craft unions the recognition of the desirability of political initiatives and change".

His attitude was summarised in a letter he wrote to Reynold's Newspaper on 28 July 1861 about a prolonged strike of builders:

"I should hope that the operative builders are by this time convinced that political power has something to do with the social conditions of the people."

Lucraft joined the Land and Labour League as the most advanced radical organisation in England and served on the Council. He was a founder member of John Stuart Mill's Land Tenure Reform Association, urging the state control of land and served on the General Council of the Association.

The International Working Men's Association

Lucraft was at the inaugural meeting of what became the First International, the International Workingmen's Association, described by Karl Marx in a famous letter to Friedrich Engels

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