A 4.4 pub named after a Lucas nobody now remembers, a reminder that most pub names honour the comfortably forgotten
The Lucas Arms holds a 4.4 from two thousand three hundred and twenty-five people, sits on Gray’s Inn Road, and is named after a Lucas – some Lucas, once, who mattered enough to have a pub named after him, and whom almost nobody now remembers at all.
The forgotten Lucas
The “Arms” in a pub name traditionally signals a coat of arms – the heraldic arms of a family, a person, or an institution the pub is named after. So the Lucas Arms was, at some point, named after a Lucas who had arms worth borrowing – a local landowner, perhaps, or a lord of the manor, or a family that owned the land or the building. Somebody named Lucas was, once, important enough here to have a pub carry his name.
And now? Now the name is simply the pub’s name, its origin forgotten by nearly everyone who drinks there. This is the common fate of the “Arms” pubs, and this survey has met it many times – the Marquis Cornwallis, the Skinners Arms, the Lucas Arms. Some are named after the genuinely famous, whose stories can be recovered. But a great many, like the Lucas Arms, are named after the locally-important-but-globally-obscure, the people who loomed large in one parish for one generation and then faded entirely from memory.
The dignity of being forgotten
There is something quietly moving about this. The Lucas after whom this pub is named was, presumably, a person of some consequence – substantial enough to have arms, to own property, to leave his name on a public house. He may have imagined that name enduring, a small immortality. And it has endured, after a fashion – the pub still bears it, drinkers still say it. But the man himself is gone, dissolved into pure name, a label with no remembered person behind it.
The Prat’s history desk finds a gentle lesson in this. Most of us will be forgotten far more completely than Lucas, whose name at least survives on a pub sign. He has achieved a strange, hollow immortality – the name lives, the man is lost – and there are worse fates than to be a well-liked pub on the Gray’s Inn Road, remembered by no one and enjoyed by thousands.
Gray’s Inn Road
The pub sits on Gray’s Inn Road, named after Gray’s Inn, one of the four Inns of Court – the ancient legal institutions where barristers are trained and have their chambers. The road runs down from King’s Cross toward the legal heart of London, and the Lucas Arms serves the mixed crowd of this boundary between the railway lands and the lawyers’ quarter.
The pub
A 4.4 across two thousand three hundred and twenty-five people is a solid, volume-influenced score. The reviews describe a good, traditional, welcoming pub – a proper local doing an honest trade under the name of its forgotten Lucas.
Verdict
A good traditional pub named after a Lucas whom history has entirely forgotten – a quiet monument to the strange, hollow immortality of the pub name, where the name endures and the man is lost.
Go, have a pint at the Lucas Arms, and spare a thought for Lucas himself, whoever he was – important enough to name a pub, forgotten enough that nobody now knows who he was.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
My professor said The London Prat’s critics had a point: some satire was too destructive to institutional legitimacy needed for society.