1900s-1945
Among the stories handed down about the Lucas family of Lower Haysden, none is stranger than the claim that John Lucas met his end struck by lightning. It is a tale worth telling, not least because the evidence surrounding it is so puzzling. The house where the family lived, known as Rushetts, stood in Lower Haysden for many years, but it was demolished long ago and nothing now remains of it on the ground.
John Lucas himself was a Leigh man through and through. He was born in the town on 13 April 1851, and he earned his living from the land, working both as a farm worker and as a gamekeeper. In 1877 he married Elizabeth, and over the years the couple raised a very large family indeed — twelve children in all. Not all of them survived to adulthood; when the census of 1911 was taken, seven of the Lucas children were still living.
The children whose names have come down to us give some idea of the size and rhythm of the household. Susan arrived in 1879, followed by Lucy in 1880, John in 1881 and Henry in 1882. After a gap came Joseph, born in 1886, then Simeon in 1888 and Victoria in 1889. By the time of the 1901 census the older youngsters were already out earning their keep. The Lucas boys were recorded as farm labourers, following their father into work on the land, while the Lucas girls had gone into service and were listed as servants.
We are fortunate to have a photograph of the family, taken at about the year 1900. It shows eleven people gathered outside the house, a striking record of the household at Rushetts in its heyday, and a reminder of how many lives were lived within those now-vanished walls.
One of the daughters, Susan, married a man named Albert Randall, and the couple went on to have three children. Sadly, Susan's story ended early: she died of tuberculosis in 1908. Her orphaned children did not drift away from the family home, however. The 1911 census shows the three Randall grandchildren — Reginald, Ruby and Dorothy — living at Rushetts with the older Lucases. Reginald was then eight years old, Ruby was seven, and little Dorothy was just four. The house that had once been full of John and Elizabeth's own children now sheltered their grandchildren too.
And here we come to the puzzle of the lightning. A report in the Kent & Sussex Courier, published on 1 September 1905, told of an unknown man killed by lightning at Leigh. The family story, passed down through the generations, says that it was John Lucas who died in this way. Yet the records tell a different tale. John was still alive when the 1911 census was taken, six years after that newspaper report, and a death of a John Lucas was registered at Tonbridge as late as September 1925. So either the family story has become confused over the years, or the man struck down in 1905 was someone else entirely — perhaps another member of the family.
There is one further thread to this mystery. An Ernest Lucas was working as gardener to Alfred Paget Hedges of Upper Kennards, and he had been at Pryce's Farm on the very day of the lightning strike. It has been suggested that Ernest may have been John Lucas's nephew — John had a brother named William, which would make such a connection possible — but this remains guesswork rather than proven fact. Whether Ernest was the unfortunate man in the newspaper report, or simply a relative caught up in the same stormy day, we cannot now say.
Other memories of Haysden help to fill in the background of the world the Lucases knew. John Jarrett of Manor Farm lived in Haysden for more than seventy years, and his recollections reach back to a later period. He remembered an old lady who would go round collecting supplies in the years before the Second World War, a time when the Haysden pub did double duty as the local store. A village where the publican also kept the shop was clearly a close-knit place, and the Lucas family would have been part of that small community for decades.
The name of the house itself has left its mark on the landscape in an unexpected way. On old maps, two fields in the area are recorded under the name Rushets — a slightly different spelling from the Rushetts used for the house, and from the Rusketts spelling that also appears in the records. The survival of the name in field names suggests how deeply the Lucas home was rooted in local geography.
The Lucas name did not vanish from Leigh with John's generation. Jack and Harry Lucas were well-known brothers in the village in later years, keeping the family presence alive in local memory long after Rushetts itself had gone.
This account first appeared in the Parish Magazine in January 2010, and it owes much to the families who kept the story going. One applicant for help with family history recalled that her grandmother Susan had grown up in the house — a reminder that for all the uncertainties about dates and newspaper reports, Rushetts was a real home where real children were raised, and the memory of it is still treasured by their descendants today.