Sarah Lucas (HA 1948)
1st January 1931 – 25th October 2023

Sarah was a well-travelled and well-educated woman with a successful business career at British Home Stores, followed by a long and happy retirement in Oxfordshire. Her nephew and godson, Edward Lucas sent us his remarks made at her funeral and a poem by Sarah’s sister-in-law:

Ten years ago I dedicated a book to Sarah, my “aunt, godmother and friend.” It was the least I could do, given how she has shaped my life.

Paradoxes abounded. She disliked what she called tribal gatherings and family chitchat. She complained that the Lucases were stiflingly clannish, the men dreadfully badly dressed, and the women downtrodden. Yet she was fiercely loyal to her relatives, both living and dead, particularly to her father’s memory and to her mother’s family, the Randolphs – compiling an archive that she bequeathed to the village of Steeple Aston.

Her relationship with the church was, in her own words, semi-detached. Her spiritual guidance to me was limited. A strict
instruction to abjure all modern translations of the bible, and all contemporary liturgy, and to take church doctrines, particularly
regarding the place of women in the world, with great scepticism.

Yet she was a model godmother. No birthday went unmarked. She had an eagle eye for my faults, and gave unstinting, sometimes scorching advice about how to remedy them. Going through her papers, I found she had kept every letter I wrote to her since the age of five; I have kept almost all of hers. One of them begins “I wonder if you realise how annoying you have become”. To be clear: that was from her to me. I was cross at the time. In retrospect she was right.

Most of all she was a friend, in fact my oldest friend, from my first solo visit to London, undertaken with trembling excitement in 1969. She claimed not to like or understand young children, and she was certainly the first grown-up to treat me as an adult. That was fun, mostly. Later, when I really was an adult, I would sometimes have to remind her that I was no longer aged six. I suspect I’m not the only one.

If she disliked children, she loathed old age. She remained at heart, and in her own mind’s eye, to the last, a strong, independent
professional woman, a breaker of hearts and of conventions, free in her decisions and her opinions. 

She was plagued by her moods. But she was happy in many places: as a student in Edinburgh, a social worker in Canada,
sailing with those lucky boyfriends, in the buzzy Camden of the 1960s and 70s, in Kidlington, and lastly in Wantage where she quickly acquired a new circle of friends and admirers.

But I remember her as happiest of all in Steeple Aston, in her early retirement years with Jean, cut short far too early in 1992. Some of us were here in this room for Jean’s funeral, and I’m glad that we meet here now to celebrate Sarah’s life. A good party, she said, and no moping.

So without moping, please fix in your mind your happiest, funniest, most striking, paradoxical, impressive memory of our remarkable relative, neighbour and friend, and carry it with you. She may be gone, but she’ll never be forgotten. ■

Poem by Morar Lucas, Sarah’s sister-in-law:
For whatever you say about Sarah
The opposite’s equally true:
She was blunt –
She was sharp –
She was generous and kind
But wilfully blind
To the impact on others of speaking her mind.
She had powerful opinions
And no inhibitions.
She would fiercely defend
Her right to offend
Those in charge, if they dared to cause friction.
Then, into reverse,
And she’d feel no remorse
At espousing complete contradiction!
But Sarah had charm and perception
which endeared her to friends and to family,
for we all of us knew
that her love filtered through,
lighting up her robust personality.

Published in the OGA Chain 2025.