Tomb of Samuel Lucas and Margaret Bright Lucas in Highgate (Western) Cemetery

Tomb of Samuel Lucas and Margaret Bright Lucas in Highgate (Western) Cemetery

This is a small stone tomb with a pitched top, situated on a landing stone in Highgate (Western) Cemetery. The tomb dates from approximately 1865, with an additional inscription added around 1890. The leaded lettering is raised, executed entirely in sans serif capitals.

The east side of the stone bears an inscription commemorating Samuel Lucas: "Here rest the remains of Samuel Lucas, aged 54. He died on the 15th of April 1865, a few hours after hearing the tidings of the destruction of the slave power in the United States, by the fall of Richmond an object which he had unceasingly laboured to promote as managing proprietor of the Morning Star." The west side commemorates his wife, Margaret: "And of Margaret Bright Lucas, his wife, who died February 4th 1890, aged 71 years. During her long widowhood, she devoted herself to the cause of Temperance, and was the President of the British Women's Temperance Association and of the World Women's Temperance Union. Her life was simple, noble, beneficent."

Samuel Lucas (1811–1865) was an industrialist, merchant, journalist, and social reformer. Born into a Quaker corn merchant family, he remained a committed Quaker throughout his life and was an opponent of the established church. His early years were spent in Surrey and London. In 1839 he married Margaret Bright, sister of John Bright of the Anti-Corn Law League, in which Lucas, a free-trade enthusiast, later became active. The family moved to Manchester in 1845, where Lucas became a partner in a cotton mill, but returned to London in 1849, where he established himself as a corn merchant. In 1847 Lucas was one of the founders of the Lancashire Public Schools Association, of which Richard Cobden became a powerful advocate. Educational reform remained central to his life's work; he advocated a decentralised, secularist system inspired by American models.

Lucas was a long-standing supporter of the campaign against slavery and appears in Benjamin Robert Haydon's group portrait "The Anti-Slavery Convention, 1840", which hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. In 1857 he became editor of the Morning Star, a radical newspaper founded by Cobden and Bright in 1856 in which Lucas held a financial stake. The paper, which ceased publication in 1869, had no connection with the modern Morning Star founded in 1930. Lucas was a prominent supporter of the North during the American Civil War and a vocal critic of slavery in the South, views reflected in the pages of the Morning Star. An obituary in the New York Times noted that "the warmth, ability and steadfastness with which he defended the cause of freedom in this country against the sneers and detractions of the Southern party in England, gave him a high place in the affections and esteem of our people." In 1862 Lucas founded the Emancipation Society in support of Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of that year, which committed the Union to ending slavery. The New York Times observed that his death "created no less sorrow in America than in England." He died on 15 April 1865, just hours after learning of the evacuation of Richmond, the capital of the Confederate States, on 2 April 1865—an event that signalled the end of the Civil War.

Margaret Bright Lucas was a temperance activist, suffragist, and committed Quaker. Following her husband's death and the marriages of their two children, she visited the north-eastern states of America, where she found a congenial network of reformers whose "advanced views and institutions of a less trammelled social system" provided inspiration for her work in England. She was elected president of the British Women's Temperance Association in 1878 and the first president of the worldwide Women's Christian Temperance Union in 1885. In 1879 she took the first women's petition in favour of Sunday closing to the House of Commons. She was also active in peace work, anti-prostitution campaigns, and women's suffrage, serving on the executive of the National Society for Women's Suffrage and the Ladies' National Association.

The tomb lies in a particularly overgrown part of Highgate Cemetery (East and West Cemeteries), which is registered as a Grade II* Park and Garden, and is at present partially buried. In the same section of consecrated ground are the tombs of Michael Faraday, Thomas Charles Druce, Charles Cruft, and Charles Spencer Green, all listed buildings. To the north lies the tomb of Henry Gray, anatomist, which is not listed.