Benjamin Lucraft (28 November 1809 – 25 September 1897) was a craftsman chair-carver in London where his radical inclinations led him to be involved in multiple 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 large 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 had 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 multiple 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 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, a number 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 Metropolitan 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.