Special trains were booked again from Victoria a few days later, when over 50,000 people from towns all over Southern England were expected to flood into Brighton for Lobby's return visit there. In the event, the booked trains were not enough and special relief services had to be added at the last moment. Later visits to Margate, Hastings, Bournemouth (again) and the Isle of Wight were also given their own trains.
Lobby continued his adventures round Britain's coastal resorts for another three weeks, reporting the usual collection of near-misses, harassed doubles and colourful encounters. He had his photograph taken with a lady midget on his knee at the top of Blackpool Tower, drew massive crowds in Brighton and noted familiar faces in some towns as he realised a handful of particularly determined Lud-hunters were following him from one destination to the next. On his return visit to Great Yarmouth, he found the town beset by rumours that local CID men were searching for him on the pier, and allowed a little paranoia to creep into his thinking. Who was that suspicious fellow in plus-fours, he wondered in one column. Hadn't he seen him before?
The prize had climbed to £150 again by the time Lobby reached the Isle of Wight on Saturday, September 3, and that's where he was captured for the second time. His downfall this time came at Ryde's New Pavilion, which Lobby later called “a perilously small and self-contained place”. Still, the paper had promised he would be there between 2:00pm and 4:00pm and so, at the appointed hour, Lobby steeled himself and walked in. “A few seconds later, I found myself looking into a face on which I have never seen grim resolution writ so large,” he reports. “It was Mussolonic in expression. It paled perceptibly, fixed me as a basilisk might its prey, seemed to imply that I had sinned against its ancestors, heirs and assigns, even unto the third and fourth generation.” (16)
That face belonged to Percy Maskell, a 30-year-old unemployed decorator from the Isle of Wight, who thrust a copy of the Gazette at Lobby and made a successful challenge. He had been out of work for six weeks, and relied on 29 shillings a week unemployment benefit to support himself, his wife and his three children. He told Lobby that he'd come up from Shanklin on the train that morning with his six-year-old son. His wife, Maskell confided, thought he was mad, but he'd been determined to join the hunt. After calling at a Ryde builders he knew to see if there was any work going - which there wasn't - he'd hurried off to the seafront to join the crowds.
“I stopped at least a dozen likely chaps on the front this morning,” he chuckled. “I kept on looking at your photo sideways, so as to try and get an idea of what the front view would be like. For lunch, I had sausage and mashed at an eating house and challenged a fellow there. Then I saw you cross the road and enter the Pavilion. You were dark, the right height and looked like the man. First I went to one door and didn't like to go in because I had nothing to spend and I thought the waitress would object. Then I went to the other and you were just inside it. I recognised the likeness at once.”
The £150 prize - equivalent to two years' worth of the unemployment benefit he was then receiving - would be “a godsend” Maskell said. He was surrounded by delighted crowds as soon as he and Lobby stepped out of the Pavilion, who congratulated him on being such a worthy winner and expressed their pleasure that a local man had won. The Gazette had a special Lobby Lud car by this time, which paraded Maskell through the town in a seat protruding from its roof while a Gazette man inside broadcast his triumph through the car's megaphone.
Lobby returned to the fray on Monday with a day in Brighton, but confessed that the stress of constant scrutiny was starting to get to him. “This morning I was in the trough of what the weather people call a deep depression,” he wrote. “The inevitable reaction, I suppose, from five weeks' constant strain. If my tactics today were apathetic, and I shirked the risks which are normally my daily tonic, I ask your indulgence, and promise you the usual sensational run for your money tomorrow.” (17)
Perhaps that promise was still in Lobby's mind when he reached Eastbourne two days later, making him just a fraction too reckless there. Whatever the reason, he allowed a woman called Jane Connolly to nab him in the town's Devonshire Park just two minutes before the day's 4:00pm cut-off. This came less than a week after Maskell's triumph, so Connolly won just £50 against his £150. But she still seemed delighted by the result. Connolly lived in Hove, within easy reach of the south coast towns Lobby had concentrated on, and she'd been pursuing him for several weeks.
“I
hunted you all the six days at Brighton,” she told him. “And followed you up at Hastings and Southsea. I realise now that I saw you in Western Road, Brighton, at the Preston Park Police Sports, and again at Brighton Station when you changed from the Hastings train to the Portsmouth one. [...] I had practically decided today that I could not afford to spend any more fares or time on the hunt and must give it up.” (18)