Either his father or he himself worked as a cabinet maker at a workshop on the east side of High Street where he paid a rate of £7.10s 0d, qualifying for a vote.
Lucraft lived with his mother at Mill Row, off Kingsland Road, as he raised his family and began to make a reputation as a draughtsman and carver.
Lucraft became one of the most famous chair-carvers of his generation and stayed at this trade until well past retiring age, turning out chairs which were admired at many exhibitions.
The company designed and sold a range of furniture and supplied the well-known retailers such as Maples, Robert Gillow and Heals (department store).
After his election to the London School Board in 1870 Lucraft was one of the working men selected to meet Lord Kimberley to express their support for the government's proposed legislation on the sale of alcohol which was then being debated.
He and his agents, including Mr Dyer, are drumming up support for Lucraft, and the temperance movement is one network they lobby hard to gain votes.
Much of the evidence for this is recorded in the National League Journal, which is the publication of Josephine Butler's movement for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts.
In one letter to the electors he says: ..with respect to the important question of temperance, and the licensing laws, I would support the placing of a legal power of restraining the issue or renewal of licences, in the hands of the inhabitants themselves, by some efficient measure of local option.
Lucraft's prowess with the chisel, and his campaigning for the improvement of the education of apprentices, led him to be asked by the Royal Society of Arts to attend the Paris Universal Exhibition Exposition Universelle (1878), and report on his findings in respect of the training of workers in the furniture trade.
He found matters far better arranged in France for the production of quality furniture and proposed wholesale changes to the apprentice system, many of which were later adopted.
He was anxious that draughtsmanship should be a part of the training, as he himself always drew out his own work, and felt men were disadvantaged in their skills if they could not do the whole piece as a craftsman.
Lucraft became the secretary and most prominent member of the North London Political Union, a Chartist group which met in Islington and which George Howell attended.
In the spring of 1848 Feargus O'Connor decided on a new strategy that would combine several different tactics: a large public meeting, a procession and the presentation of a petition to the House of Commons.
George Howell wrote a handwritten note about Lucraft's life and activities which survived in the papers of the Bishopsgate Institute and is re-produced here: "Mr Lucraft may be described as almost the last surviving link between the old Chartist movements prior to 1850, and the newer political movements which grew out of the Chartist agitation towards the end of the fifties and onward until the Reform Act of 1884.
Next to chartism pure and simple, that is "the six points", he was an ardent advocate of Land Law Reform and of Technical Education, and was one of the promoters of, and exhibitors at the first Workman's Exhibition in the Agricultural Hall in 186_ (sic).
The last Chartist conference opened in London on Monday 8 February 1858, and Lucraft shared the chair with Alderman Thomas Livesey of Rochdale.
in 1809 made the purchase of votes illegal and was one of a series of acts of Parliament which dealt with minor abuses of the electoral process during the first part of the 19th century.
The Reform Act 1832 had made some steps to change the way Parliament was elected with the old system of rotten boroughs with just a handful of voters, literally less than 10 people in some cases, was swept away.
He understood the crucial importance of the craft unions in any viable working-class political movement and accepted a need for militant action to achieve defined aims and goals.
The modest programme that Edward Beales and George Howell, leaders of the League, were promoting began to be challenged by Lucraft in April 1866 when he started weekly outdoor meetings on Monday nights on Clerkenwell Green – thereby reached out to working-class groups hitherto unresponsive to more traditional political agitation.
Early in 1867 the militant elements in the leadership of the Reform League again decided that more vigorous action was required, this time against the Derby-Disraeli ministry, and weekly demonstrations began in Trafalgar Square.
This was first banned by the Home Secretary Spencer Walpole and then, because of the very large numbers that gathered round the ten platforms, allowed to proceed in spite of thousands of police and troops.
Unwilling to allow Lucraft to outface them the Executive decided to hold its own Trafalgar Square meeting on 2 July and Howell was appointed to supervise the arrangements.
The authorities became frightened by the spectre of revolution and Sir Richard Mayne, Metropolitan Police Commissioner, banned the meeting although a majority of the Executive resolved to ignore the prohibition.
Unlike July 1866 the League showed its capacity for organising a working-class agitation in defiance of parliamentary authority while keeping good order despite some small local violence.
The workers forced their way through the police cordons, past flailing truncheons, to a noisy rally where a short section of the park railings were pushed over.
While Benjamin Disraeli denied he was yielding to pressure he accepted the lodger franchise proposals, removed the distinction between personal and compound ratepayers, allowed it to be a household suffrage measure and stripped most of the guarantees which the Conservatives had been promised.
After a dispute about his signature being on the document written by Marx for the Council 'The Civil War in France', when it was clear he had had the chance to remove it if he chose to do so, Lucraft resigned admitting he had formed his views on the article from the press reports.
In 1870 four women, Flora Stevenson, Lydia Becker, Emily Davies and Elizabeth Garrett Anderson were elected to local School Boards.
London Democrats held a celebration for Lucraft's election on 2 January 1871 at the Hole in the Wall in Hatton Garden with "feasting, speech-making, and other joyous observances".