The Diaries of Mr Lucas, page 20
8 November 1969 (Saturday):
So David Jackson is dead, killed by Michael Luke, so a brief notice in the evening paper says. It was a crime passionnel, of course, and not surprising. When two self-centred homosexuals of the lower classes live together, each of them with a hysterical personality, without taste or insight, and coming from a situation of society where violence is not unusual, it’s pretty certain something like this will happen.
A rather harsh reaction from Mr Lucas, tempered slightly by feelings of remorse for Jackson’s parents – and also for those of Luke. ‘I’m… even more sorry for Luke’s poor old mother, a decent Catholic widow, I think, and not to be blamed for her son. But Jackson is no loss – a vicious rent boy six years ago, later one of a Clapham Common rolling gang and in recent years dabbling in whatever small dishonesty came to his hands. There’s bad blood in that family and it’s to be hoped his brother Stewart, Dave the Roller, doesn’t pass it on.’
One factor that does come into play is Mr Lucas’s continuing fixation with Irish Peter. ‘As always,’ he writes in November 1969, ‘when I hear of the death of someone in the homosexual underworld, I wish “if only it had been Peter!”’ If only indeed. But the ending to the Jackson murder is even more tragic.
12 December 1969 (Friday):
That odd youth, very plain and gawky, who used always to be asking where David Jackson was, came hurrying up to tell Lynch of the murder, produced Jackson’s lighter, now his… and declared that Michael Luke had committed suicide in Brixton early this week. I don’t know whether to believe this… but if it’s true, it may not be any matter for regrets. I didn’t dislike Luke, and indeed found him a pleasant fellow; but I doubt he’d have been either happy or honest had he lived.
London in the twenty-first century was shocked by the crimes of Stephen Port, a serial killer and rapist sentenced in 2016 to a whole life order, meaning he will never be released, for murdering four young men and raping countless others between 2014 and 2015. The case exposed many faults, particularly in terms of how London’s Metropolitan Police handled the case, even when confronted with evidence that a serial killer was loose in the city. A report by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services into the Met’s handling of the case published in 2023 was damning in its judgement of London’s police force.
Between June 2014 and September 2015, Stephen Port drugged, sexually assaulted and murdered four young men in East London. Despite the obvious similarities between the deaths, the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) failed to recognize that they might be connected. They even failed to recognize, until after the last death, that Port’s four young victims – Anthony Walgate, Gabriel Kovari, Daniel Whitworth and Jack Taylor – had been murdered. Had the police conducted a professional and thorough investigation after Anthony Walgate’s death, it is entirely possible that the other three men would still be alive. But the MPS’s initial response to each of the deaths was reprehensible. As the coroner who held inquests into the four deaths said, there were a ‘large number of very serious and very basic investigative failings’.2
The Metropolitan Police did not respond to a request for further comment.
The report’s findings notwithstanding, the Stephen Port murders stand as a reminder that the dangers of the past are still very much with us in the present.
22 June 1968 (Saturday):
There’s another homosexual murder reported. A quiet middle-aged Scotsman called Stephens was stabbed to death in his bathroom at a little before 2 o’clock this morning – fifty deep stab wounds in him, and his trousers off. He had brought a young man back earlier, and it’s pretty clear what happened; the sort of thing that can happen to any of us.
Mr Lucas’s own experience of violence had started much earlier. Growing up was a horror for him. In 1974, Mr Lucas witnessed the closure of his old school, Clark’s in Ilford, which acted as a trigger to ponder his own future – and look back with hopelessly rose-tinted glasses at the past. And I say rose-tinted as we’ve already heard how he was bullied mercilessly at school. ‘I must go to Ilford this weekend and find out what’s to be done about the school furniture, etc.,’ he writes in April that year. ‘I want to be in at the death of the old school I left thirty years ago this July. I should like to revisit those rooms where I spent five pleasant years, the pleasantest, I think, of all my years.’
Reading that sentence feels almost as if Mr Lucas is employing very rare irony, but no, I don’t think he is being ironic. Despite the bullying, despite the name-calling – despite everything – on occasion he seems to believe his life now is worse than it was then. He is, in essence, a miserabilist.
Part of his reoccurring fears are to do with drifting into penury and dying destitute, despite being a constant saver and always finickity over his finances. His diaries are full of how much he spends on cake – Battenberg (‘stale’) for 5s [£5.40] – as well as rent boys (usually £3–£4 [£65–£86]). We hear about his bank balance, which at the end of 1968 stood at £497-2s-8d [a touch under £10,750], ‘thanks to my mother’s gift and the other windfalls during the year’; his pension fund and building society savings and money held in a unit trust – £248 [about £5,400]; and funds held in his savings bank and premium bonds – £21-8s-6d [a little over £460]. Mr Lucas is not poor by any means, but worry he still does.
19 February 1968 (Monday):
Lying in bed last night I thought of my saving for retirement, of the £10,000 [£220,000] I hope to have, in eighteen years’ time, to purchase an annuity so that I shall have an undiminished income from sixty-five onwards. But I don’t want to live another twenty-three years, or even eighteen. The times are bad enough now for one of my temperament and, once my mother is no longer here to be grieved at my going, I too would be gone, before the world of the eighties is come. And even if I do live on to sixty and sixty-five, I can have no certainty that inflation will not have made £10,000 inadequate for my purpose; or perhaps, twenty years hence, a socialist administration will have put an end to such devices as annuities, and to private savings too, very like. And, of course, there’s a very real chance that, sometime in the next decade or two, the flaccid shallow democracy that is Britain will fall to the strong clear-sighted enemy in the East. There will be no cushioned old age for me then.
Yet despite his regular hand-outs, his retirement was distinctly well cushioned. Estimates varied as to how much his estate was worth, but 24a Mandalay Road sold in May 2018 for £650,000. It shows just how many repairs were needed as it resold just under a year later for £905,000 – a cool £255,000 profit in just eleven months.
There was money apportioned in the will for his funeral, but that was a painfully soulless affair held at a crematorium in north London with only three of us present: myself, Craig and the long-suffering downstairs neighbour. Mr Lucas had initially asked that his body be left to medical science, which in itself would have been the perfect way to end not just this book, but indeed his entire life: what made Mr Lucas tick – literally? I have the will in front of me as I write this. ‘I direct that after my death any organs or parts of my body, which are required for therapeutic or research purposes, shall be removed without delay and made available for the said purposes and my body then made available for dissection.’
But it was not to be. His body had lain too long unfound at 24a Mandalay Road for it to be of much use to medical science. Fortunately, his will had also made provision for this. ‘And I further direct that if my body shall not be accepted for dissection, my Trustees shall cause it to be cremated and my ashes to be disposed of in accordance with my wishes, which I communicated to them. No unnecessary expenses other than the expense of a convivial party after cremation to be incurred and no religious service to be held.’
‘Unfortunately, he died shortly after Christmas,’ Craig told me. ‘And he’d kind of been lying around indoors. So I mentioned the medical science bit to some people, and they basically said, “Thank you, but no thank you.” So I went off to the undertaker’s and just arranged the basic funeral.’ There was also to be no convivial party other than me and Craig in the pub with a couple of pints. Not quite the death Mr Lucas wanted, but then even his best-laid plans went awry at the very last part of his life. He’d asked for his ashes to be scattered in his old garden at Bath Road, where he’d lived with his parents – something Craig attempted to do but didn’t quite succeed. ‘I couldn’t just dump them in someone’s garden,’ he said. ‘What would have happened if someone had turned up while I was doing it? So I did the best compromise I could think of, and I scattered the ashes in a park opposite.’
I’d like to say that was it. But, of course, it wasn’t. Craig and I had been named as co-executors of his will, but in the chaos of Mr Lucas’s death, the rush to clear the flat and the general melee that occurs when someone dies, the original will was lost. The most organized and pernickety person in the world, this would have horrified Mr Lucas. Every time – every single time – I went round to see him, he would bring it out and check my address and phone number were still the same. In his latter years, he even went as far as to have the will laminated… I’m almost surprised it didn’t end up alongside his rent boys on a commemorative plate. But lost it was, kick-starting an incredibly torturous eight-year process that would only come to an end for Craig on 31 January 2023. ‘I finally got paid today,’ he wrote in an email to me, going on to detail how he had received about a sixth of what he had initially thought he would get.
Because Craig and I could only locate a copy of the will, we were not able to gain probate easily – or quickly. Our lawyer battled valiantly and steadfastly but probate was not awarded until several years after Mr Lucas’s death. In the meantime, professional heir hunters had got a whiff of the potential value of the estate and went in search of potential benefactors as, technically, Mr Lucas had died intestate. Several months later, more than twenty third cousins twice-removed were located and a Battle Royale began. I bowed out in 2016, heartily sick of the whole process and just in despair at what Mr Lucas would have made of it all – and how he would have hated to let Craig down.
The will I’m looking at now is the same as I saw often between 1994 and 2014, both in paper and laminated form. It’s full of wonderfully antiquated curios – as you’d expect Mr Lucas’s last will and testament to be.
To Mrs June Field of 15 Crestfield Mews Hazlewood Glanmire in the County of Cork Ireland, my silver vase and silver crumb scoop, formerly the property of my late mother.
To the Cats Protection League of 17 Kings Road Horsham West Sussex RH13-5PN, a registered charity no.203644, the sum of Three Thousand Pounds (£3,000).
To the Pink Triangle Trust of 34 Spring Lane, Kenilworth, Warwickshire, a registered charity no. 1015629, the sum of Three Thousand Pounds (£3,000).
And, for the sake of transparency, to me as well:
To Hugo Greenhalgh aforesaid, the sum of Ten Thousand Pounds (£10,000).
Mrs Field died several years ago and her appreciation – or otherwise – of the silver crumb spoon is, like many of the characters who flit in and out of the diaries, lost to the mists of time.
To fast forward slightly, Craig finally came to an agreement with the heir hunters that saw his inheritance split 60:40 between them and him. Again, Mr Lucas, who very rarely mentions his distant relatives in his diaries, would be utterly dismayed that the one person left at the end did not receive his rightful due.
‘I mean, he was a funny old bugger right at the end,’ Craig told me. ‘But there were some funny things that happened over the years that make me laugh to look back at him. There was the time when he got his foot run over. He was down the West End and stepped off the kerb and a taxi ran over his foot. And then I got this mad phone call from St Thomas’s [Hospital] to come and collect him. At the end, it was so funny, he was going around trying to tip the staff.’ Like he was Princess Margaret, I interjected. ‘Yeah, exactly that – but that’s who he was right until the very end.’
Postscript
SO HE’S GONE, leaving behind fifty-six diaries and millions upon millions of words. Other than the mess of the will, he left pretty much nothing else; his books, long collected and cared for, dumped in a skip at the front of the Clapham flat before I could rescue them. Yet the diaries stand as the summation of a long life, eighty-eight years partly spent in the shadows, both accidentally and deliberately. A life complaining about penile discomfort while celebrating his conquests, the diaries are both banal and brilliant.
12 March 1968 (Tuesday):
A letter from my mother, in her accustomed style, complaining ‘I am not well. I wish I had never come here’ and tartly adding ‘You have pain after food. Surely you can get tablets for that.’ No pain or discomfort tonight. If I can move my normal time of defecation to morning or midday, I may be free of penile numbness by evening.
14 January 1973 (Sunday):
A clear bright day, not cold. Intermittent defecations this morning, with much use of lavatory paper, resulted in partial choking of the W.C. outfall, I was dismayed to see the water rise almost to seat level when I flushed it, and it took several flushings to disperse this paper bolus.
Why should we care? Why is Mr Lucas remarkable despite his classically unremarkable life? Put yourself in his well-worn, but always polished, shoes. Almost fifty years as a civil servant; many, if not all, spent alone. Passions left from decades ago; obsessions masquerading as love. Was it a life he enjoyed? Was it a life well led? For Mr Lucas, always aware of how history might remember him – and for us, the readers of his diaries – the answer would probably be no.
4 June 1969 (Wednesday):
I wish I could withdraw altogether from the West End. Better the stodge-pudding of office, flat and cinema than the gay painted apples of Piccadilly and Soho with their so-bitter core.
Yet there is something that does make him remarkable. Not just his diaries, not just how he lived his life, but the man himself. Throughout this book, I’ve tried to tell the story of Mr Lucas from his own words, but also, somehow, to separate him from them. That constant question of whether we can trust his diaries to really tell us who he was still stands. At the risk of asking too many questions, have I, as his friend, the executor of his will and the custodian of his diaries, actually managed to answer that question of who Mr Lucas was?
To be frank – and perhaps counterintuitive – I hope not entirely.
Every life is messy; every life cannot be tucked neatly into a book, even with his extensive diaries to help us. We can parlay his life into a metaphor for the times: Mr Lucas as a guide to a lost queer London. It’s happily not that simple. Mr Lucas is no long-lost hero. His views, right-wing and not even right of centre, are spectacularly out of favour in today’s more liberal age. Predator or prey, either way, some of his actions damn him through the lens of modern eyes. What we do see, though, is the passing of time, passing Mr Lucas by to a very large extent, but also allowing the reader to trace the history of London as its weaves and wends its way through the middle of the twentieth century.
1 January 1968 (Monday):
I look back eighteen years to 1950. When I was twenty-four, the London scene was not changed much; places, buildings, familiar to the homosexual world of 1950 had been familiar for a long time. And how many there were – the public rendezvous at Marble Arch and Piccadilly Circus and Trafalgar Square; the numerous gay bars: the ‘Standard’ in Piccadilly Circus, the celebrated ‘Fitzroy’ in Rathbone Place, the ‘Bunch of Grapes’ on the south side of the Strand, with its stone canopy carved in the form of a cornucopia over the door; ‘Rainbow Corner’ by the Monico in Shaftesbury Avenue… and, of course, the lavatories of the ‘Grand Tour’; starting with Falconberg Court and ending at York Place.
The descriptions of the time are acute, even down to Mr Lucas’s distaste for modern life – and life in general. And, mercifully, amid the gloom, they are also funny.
13 July 1961 (Thursday):
To see La Dolce Vita this afternoon – an incoherent and episodic film of the ‘decadent’ society of Rome – which appeared to be as ‘decadent’ as Nuneaton or Bournemouth!
26 September 1968 (Thursday):
I woke to the splashing of rain, but this ceased during the morning, and the rest of the day was dull, cloudy and dry. The chattering banality of the radio in the morning is so unbearable that to escape these disc-jockeys, I tuned to Radio 2, as they call it, that by day is disturbed by crackling and interference. But these noises are preferable to the bright silliness of Mr Tony Blackburn.
There are no lessons we can take from Mr Lucas’s rackety life; no moral message relevant today that his diaries offer us an easy in to. Consider the man beyond the diaries: difficult, but important to do. His life was wracked with pain, seeped in the associated misery of living in an age that simply meant being gay, having sex, was illegal. But he kept on going. So did hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands of gay and bisexual men, so this does not make him remarkable. What does? For me, it was his resilience, his tenacity and – to be frank – his ability to turn a neat sentence.
9 June 1965 (Wednesday):
In these rather cool overcast days, I have been visiting in thought that brilliant summer of twenty-five years ago. Memory is the frail bridge leading back across the misty years to those days of May and early June. I see the sunlight dazzling the trees in Valentine’s Park, and behind the school yard shining in on the black scarred desks of form six or the newer lightly varnished worn ones in form three. The German armies were driving across the low countries and northern France in those days, but more important to us was whether last night’s homework would pass muster. Where are they now, my fellows who shared that golden term of long drowsy afternoons?
