Famous Cricketers No 89 - F.S.Jackson

F. S. Jackson Francis Stanley Jackson was born on Monday 21 November 1870 at Chapel Allerton, near Leeds. He was the seventh child and second son of Grace and William Lawies Jackson, later the first Baron Allerton of Chapel Allerton. The Jackson family fortune derived from the tanning and currying works of Messrs W.L.Jackson and Co. which were situated at nearby Buslingthorpe in Leeds. Jackson’s father had inherited the Buslingthorpe works in a parlous state when he was seventeen and turned it into one of the largest tanning and currying concerns in the country. Jackson’s mother, Grace Tempest, was a native of Otley from a staunch Conservative family. Elected to Parliament in 1880, Jackson’s father, enjoying the patronage of Lord Randolph Churchill, was appointed Financial Secretary to the Treasury in Lord Salisbury’s Government, a post he held until 1891, when he succeeded Balfour as Chief Secretary for Ireland. To his sons William Lawies Jackson was always ‘the guv’nor’. Stanley Jackson inherited much of his father’s tenacity of purpose. Like his father the focus of his life was family, business and politics. Cricket was never more than a part of his life which makes his career all the more remarkable. Sir Home Gordon attempted to pin down the secret of Jackson’s success in Background of Cricket (1939): “I saw him play his first match against Eton as a fully-fledged cricketer; splendid bat, perfect field, excellent fastish bowler. All others I have heard or seen as cricketers developed, but ‘Jacker’ never could - there was no scope. He passed fromHarrow to Cambridge, thence to Yorkshire and so to England, merely adapting his own methods to the prevalent conditions but being distinctively the same player all through.” Lionel Palairet, C.B.Fry, Gilbert Jessop, Plum Warner, R.E.Foster, Ranji, Frank Mitchell and A.O.Jones were among Jackson’s contemporaries, but he alone played for England while still at university. He was a batsman who combined native Yorkshire grit with an orthodox technique and a penchant for forcing strokes in front of square on both sides of the wicket; he was a particularly gifted exponent of the cut, and his driving, notably off his legs, dealt harshly with the slightest lapse in line or length. He was regarded as being as good a player of fast bowling as any batsman in the land. His response to anything pitched short was robustly uncomplicated; occasionally he might duck or sway out of the path of the ball, but more often than not he cut or hooked the ball to the boundary. He was a thoughtful bowler who relied on line and length and subtle changes of pace to undo batsmen; the sort of bowler who - every now and then - is liable to bowl a completely unplayable delivery. Operating off a run that was never over-long, he bowled at a brisk fast-medium pace with a high, easy action that tended to make the ball come off the wicket appreciably faster than a batsman anticipated. Never an out-and-out fast bowler, even near the end of his career he could still produce a very awkward ‘faster’ ball. He attacked the stumps, or pitched on a nagging length in the batsman’s area of maximum uncertainty, just outside his off-stump. From his Cambridge days he was reputed to be one of the meanest bowlers of his type. Undoubtedly, the deadliest weapon in his armoury was the ball he cut back into the right-handed batsman from a good length. Cometh the moment, cometh the man. It was on bad wickets, or wickets damaged by rain, that Jackson often produced his best batting. It seemed sometimes that only adversity - be it a glue-pot of a rain-ruined wicket, or the threat of an imminent England collapse - summoned forth his best form 3