Lives in Cricket No 43 - John Jackson

7 aspiring to anything better. Whatever schooling the young John Jackson received was rudimentary which may account for the age discrepancies on the census returns. Apart from struggling with his figure work he was unable to sign his own name on his son Harry’s birth certificate in 1865 and had to resort to the illiterate’s ‘mark’ in the space for the father’s signature. What would have become of him had he not been good at the game of cricket is beyond imagining. We should not, however, be too surprised at this lack of a formal education. With the industrial revolution in full swing in England in the 1830s, very few children received any sort of education apart from those whose parents could afford to send them to be educated at a public school. Indeed, compared to the lot of many children who were forced to spend long hours working in the mills in northern England, Jackson was fairly lucky to be able to hone his cricket skills on the village green and occasionally work for the local farmers. Wellow is a village in the Nottinghamshire district of Ollerton. It has a village green upon which young John Jackson played his first cricket. He learnt how to bowl straight by bowling at milestones on the highway. He grew into a big, strong boy with the ideal build for hurling down the thunderbolt deliveries which were to make him famous. Besides practising his cricket, he strengthened his legs and improved his stamina by following the hunt in the Rufford country during the winter months. The Rufford amalgamated with the Grove in 1957 and is now known as the Grove and Rufford Hunt. Jackson’s childhood home was situated in what was then a hotbed of Nottinghamshire cricket with powerful clubs like Newark and Southwell lying within a comfortable radius of Wellow. The future All-England cricketer became one of the crack bowlers on the village green at Wellow where he spent all his time practising his cricket when he was not doing odd jobs for the local farmers. As he grew bigger and stronger he took to walking the seven miles to Southwell each day where he would hang about the cricket ground watching the club cricketers practise until someone threw him a sixpence to ‘send a few down’ at them. It did not take these experienced players long to realise that they had discovered a potential diamond. Cricket had been played at Southwell since the 18th century. The earliest reference to a match there dates back to 6th September 1787. Lord Byron was known to have practised there wearing any number of waistcoats to sweat some weight off and to keep fit. When the young Jackson first walked into the ground, the club’s star players were the Tinley brothers - Francis Edward, Robert Crispin and Vincent - all of whom played for Nottinghamshire, with R.C.Tinley achieving everlasting fame as a lob bowler. In his early days R.C. had been a fast bowler, but later in his career he adopted a slow under-arm delivery which proved the perfect contrast to the pace and hostility of Jackson at the other end. The pair were to provide fearful opposition to inexperienced local batsmen in the odds matches played by the All-England Eleven. The Tinleys were instrumental in introducing Jackson to William Clarke and the All-England Eleven and Jackson’s Birth and Early Life