In Hertfordshire, Hermits With Haircuts Hardly Ever Happen

The Age

Monday January 27, 2003

TIM HARRIS

One of the peculiarities of humans is how they feel about loners.

Hermits excite curiosity, sometimes to the point where their status becomes technically questionable. So it was with the Hermit of Hertfordshire, James Lucas.

James led an active social life, but he maintained his hermitic credentials by doing a first-rate job of not getting out much.

James was the model of a pampered, 19th-century child. Born in 1813 to comfortably well-off parents, in what is now the New Town of Stevenage, he was his mother's darling. He was indulged to such an extent that, if he felt like staying in bed for days at a time, his dear Mama would let him do so without a qualm.

The records left of the young James paint a picture of an insufferable child. He would keep his eyes closed on the world when out driving with his sisters, and took the air carrying a green parasol, followed by a manservant.

Despite his cosseted childhood, James was intelligent and well-read. He was normal enough to fall in love with a local beauty, but the romance failed. Thereafter, he concentrated on caring for his mother.

Mama had, after all, devoted herself to her son when he was a boy, so, in a way, it was reasonable that James should spend his time attending to her in her declining years. That he was still doing so at the age of 36 is slightly unusual, but trivial in the light of what happened next.

Popular psychology would categorise James as having ``mother issues". They were so deep-seated that, when Mrs Lucas died in 1849, her son seems to have lost the plot completely. Unable to bear the thought of being without her, the 19th-century prototype of Hitchcock's Norman Bates subjected her to a backyard embalming job and kept her at home for three months.

The remains were decently interred after police intervention, and James' career as a hermit began. He retreated to the kitchen, where he lived for 25 years.

James was quite zealous about the austerity of his new calling. He lived without furniture, and slept on a bed of ashes from the fire he kept burning. In the best hermit tradition, he dispensed with washing and haircuts, and avoided clothing as well. He dressed in nothing but a blanket fastened with a skewer, although he added a touch of refinement by using a bit of broken glass as a monocle.

James lived on a diet of bread, eggs, herrings, cheese and gin. He kept sherry on hand for refined visitors, and he received a steady stream of them, as the Hermit of Hertfordshire became something of a celebrity.

Gawpers were discouraged, but he was happy to pass the time through the barred kitchen window with scholars and tramps. Charles Dickens paid a visit, and for some reason portrayed him as an ``obscure nuisance". It is difficult to see just how a man who shut himself in his kitchen could constitute a nuisance. The indigent who called on him certainly didn't think so, as they usually went away with money in their pockets and gin in their bellies.

James' financial charity was dispensed in coins, which were supplied by a monthly standing order with his bankers. He refused to accept paper money, and did not recognise Queen Victoria and her government as legitimate, believing in the Jacobite cause even though it ceased to have any political importance after 1745.

This - as well as living in an empty kitchen and handing out gin to tramps - attracted the attention of the Commissioners of Lunacy. James was examined in 1851, but found to be ``of the most acute intelligence". He was allowed to live on in the kitchen, dispensing gin and charity, until his death from apoplexy in 1879.

By then, 17 cartloads of ash had accumulated in his hermitage.