Lives in Cricket No 43 - John Jackson

89 Family Life and Decline 1880 to 1901 bowler, was forced out of the game by drink, and it is more than possible that drink was a party to Jackson’s demise also. After all, the All-England Cricketers spent so long away from home with fellow professionals and the inevitable ‘hangers-on’ for company, that many turned to drink, and there were always plenty of offers to feed their habit from members of the public keen to boast about taking liquid refreshment with a star cricketer of the AEE. Pullin in the course of his interview with Jackson mentions that the fast bowler ‘had his demons’ but does not elaborate further. Richard Daft mentions that ‘Jackson was always getting into scrapes’ but goes no further than that. There are some clear hints that there was in Jackson’s makeup a flaw that was to cause his downfall. So drink may have been a problem. So might his temper. We have noted how he regularly hurled down beamers at top pace at batsmen who defied him for long. We have noted that he was not above deliberately hurling a ball he had fielded to hit Carpenter in an AEE v UAE match, after that batsman had hit Jackson about a bit. Then there was his refusal of his captain’s request to kiss a Maori lady in New Zealand. Were these symptoms of a malaise within Jackson which, coupled with a fondness for drink, made him a hard companion to live with when he was about all the time? After all, Mahala and the children had seen little of him when he was still playing cricket which had involved long absences from home. No man could get rich playing cricket in the mid-nineteenth century. After his retirement from cricket Jackson’s income would have dropped considerably. Nottinghamshire gave him a benefit in 1874 which raised £300, not a negligible amount for those days and one which should have helped help him through old age. The fact that it did not is perhaps some indication of the kind of life he led and the type of man he was. It is likely that Mahala and the children grew tired of having this morose, bad- tempered man living with them and the result was a split up serious enough to preclude him living with any of them. Jackson had no trade to fall back on once his playing days were over. Nor had he received much, if anything, in the way of a formal education. Left on his own the only help that Jackson seems to have received on a regular basis in his later desperate years was a weekly payment of 5s 6d from the Cricketers’ Benevolent Fund. He was also being helped by the Sugg brothers, Albert and Frank, ex-professional cricketers with Derbyshire and Lancashire and in the 1890s sports outfitters in Whitechapel, Liverpool. Hearing of Jackson’s situation, they set him up in lodgings and did their best to care for him. Despite their best efforts, though, he did spend some time in the Liverpool Workhouse. The Victorian Workhouse was a refuge of last resort. When you were down and out, sick or penniless the workhouse was the only place where you could go if you did not want to sleep in the street. A stigma was attached to the workhouse and families tended to be ashamed of relatives who finished up in one of them. Jackson’s last years were spent either in the workhouse on Brownlow Hill,