Lucas, Thomas Pennington   (1843 - 1917)

Born at Dunbartonshire, Scotland, on 29 July 1843; emigrated to Australia, departing from England on 3 December 1876 on the Essex, arriving at Melbourne, Vic, on 10 March 1877; died at Brisbane, Qld, on 15 November 1917.

Dr Thomas Pennington Lucas is best known today as a naturalist with interests in entomology and ornithology and as a medical practitioner although he was also dubbed a writer, philosopher and utopian dreamer.

He was offered a place at Cambridge University, but could not afford to study and had to decline. As luck would have it, the local squire at Stow-on-the-Wold (Gloucestershire), W. Chamberlayne, where Thomas's father served the local parishioners, took a paternal interest in the young man and arranged for him to study at the School of Mines, London. In 1870, Thomas had received his Licentiate of Medicine and Midwifery of the Royal College of Physicians (Edinburgh) and Licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries (London), and, in 1871, he became a member of the Royal College of Surgeons, England.

His first wife, Mary Frances Davies, died in 1875 and Thomas developed tuberculosis. Leaving his three children with relatives and friends, Thomas accepted a position as surgeon on an Australiarn-bound barque, the Essex, which departed fromn England on 3 December 1876 and arrived in Melbourne, Vic, on 10 March 1877.

He first went to the Riverina district for his health and then to Fiji to visit Methodist missionaries returning to Melbourne in 1877 where he set up a medical practice.

He married again to Mary Bradbury Ironside in 1878, fathering seven children of whom four died within days of being born. His three children from his first mariage arrived in April 1879 to live with Thomas and their stepmother at 'Balaclava House', Emerald Hill (now South Melbourne).

The family moved to Brisbane about 1886 where Thomas continued practising medicine. His second wife, Mary, died on 22 June 1888 after giving birth to their seventh child, who also died within the month. Thomas remarried for the third time, on 31 January 1889, to Susan Draper who outlived him, as he died on 15 November 1917.

Some bad business ventures involving an ointment from Papaw (Carica papaya) left him bankrupt towards the end of his life.

Thomas joined the Linnean Society of New South Wales in 1861, was a founding member of the Field Naturalists Club of Victoria (FNCV) in 1882 and became a close friend of Baron Ferdinand von Mueller at the Melbourne Botanical Gardens. In Brisbane, he joined the Royal Society of Queensland in April 1887. As well, he was a memtber of the Entomological Society, London, The Literary and Scientifc Club and the Natural History Society of Queensland.

Source: Extracted from book: 'Passions in Ornithology: A century of Australian Egg Collectors' (2020), Mason & Pfitzner, Canberra. [consult for source references]
Portrait: A sketch of Thomas P. Lucas - courtesy of Jeanette Ashcroft, extracted from: above book.

Collecting localities for 'Lucas, T.P.' from AVH (2022)

Data from 227 specimens