Besides being a batsman of sublime gifts and a genuine cult hero of Australian sport, Archie Jackson was, according to his biographer David Frith, a young man with whom acquaintances wished to share intimate friendship – the kind that cricket’s long, introspective, sun-drenched hours so uniquely foster.
Jackson was a contemporary of Don Bradman, appearing on the first-class scene as an especially boyish 17-year-old in 1926-27. Two years earlier his club captain at Balmain, the Australian spinner Arthur Mailey, had joked, “young Jackson is going to wreck the averages of some bowlers. Fortunately, I’m in the same team, so it won’t be mine.”
In 1929 and while still a teenager, Jackson stroked his way to a majestic 164 on his Test debut against England at Adelaide after Australia had slumped to 19-3 against the likes of Maurice Tate and the fearsome Harold Larwood. On 97 that day, he’d driven Larwood to the boundary to reach three figures, a blow the bowler later described as a “glorious stroke [that] has lived in my memory to this day for its ease and perfect timing”.
In one of the great tragedies of Australian sport, Jackson died at just 23 in early 1933, victim of long-undiagnosed tuberculosis that had began ravaging his lungs as early as the 1930 Ashes tour. That magnificent hundred at Adelaide would be his only Test century in a career that spanned a week over two years. Jackson’s untimely passing robbed the nation of a joyful, innocent and uncomplicated talent of boundless promise, plunging the Australian game into grief of a depth it wouldn’t know again until 82 years later and the tragic, premature death of another Test batting wunderkind, Phillip Hughes.
The loss of Hughes sent cricket into a prolonged and unprecedented period of communal mourning, visual and symbolic cues to which still linger everywhere, no more so than among the team-mates to whom he was as cherished as Archie Jackson once was to his. First we put out our bats, now his presence is acknowledged by batsmen passing the century mark, his Test player number 408 seen everywhere from armbands to shirts and the backs of his team-mates bats.
These tokens of commemoration are certainly not a contemporary affectation. When Australian Bill Hunt played his one and only Test against South Africa in the summer of 1931-32, he did so in the observably tight flannels belonging to his cherished childhood friend Jackson, whose health had by that stage deteriorated badly.
Present is the memory of Hughes too in the new-design neck guards that attach to the back of players’ helmets, a reminder that for all its splendor, cricket is by nature a dangerous game whose practitioners are brave and take risks every time they step onto a field and entertain us.
This past cricket year, it’s safe to say, has been an especially mournful one for the loss of not only Hughes, but the Australian game’s voice and conscience, Richie Benaud, much-loved Invincibles opener Arthur Morris, former Test captain Ian Craig – who like Hughes suffered the fate of being compared to Bradman a little too early in his unusual career – plus Tied Test combatant Lindsay Kline and Frank “Typhoon” Tyson, the man who tore Australia to shreds in the Melbourne Test of 1954-55 and then, like Larwood before him, became one of us and settled in Australia.
When it came to Phillip Hughes the cricketer, much was made of that ungainly, autodidact’s technique – the way he’d spring out of an awkwardly crouched stance and flay fast bowling over gully or the ungainly baseball-style clubbing he used to dispatch bowlers of every type. For all the triumph of that Bradman-esque first Test series in South Africa, there was a proven fallibility to Hughes’s methods that might have endeared him a little more to fans in the age of centres of excellence; an era that increasingly demands technical and aesthetic uniformity.
Frith sub-titled his masterful account of Archie Jackson’s life The Keats of Cricket, and though the easy grace of Jackson’s style sat at odds with what we know of Hughes, at times such as Friday’s dreaded first anniversary, it’s perhaps best to revel in what was lyrical of a batsman than rake over circular patterns of sorrow and loss.
And in actual fact, there are certain overlaps between the stories of the two players; both polite, humble and kind young men but also quietly determined; each belting a rapid path to stardom as New South Wales prodigies before bursting onto the Test scene in grand style; Jackson so casual as to absent-mindedly overlook an invitation to the House of Commons, earthy Hughes so immune to the heavy atmosphere of his surroundings that an unfavourable decision during the 2013 Ashes series precipitated a sweary outburst and a swipe of his bat at an antique mantelpiece at Lord’s.
Like Hughes, Jackson possessed a cheeky sense of humour that endeared him even to opponents. “You must have had a late one last night, Harold!” he once jested at Larwood as the paceman laboured through a fruitless session. “You just had to find a place in your heart for a for a fellow like him,” the bowler would later conclude.
“Being a child of nature,” Frith noted, “[Jackson] had to bat in a certain manner and no other,” a description that also fits Hughes well. A.B.R. Roche, a friend of Jackson’s, added, “Archie in his forward driving strokes used his whole body from toes to head, and he only straightened up after contact... All his strokes were natural and his only.” Bradman once asked Jackson how he played the leg glance. “I don’t know,” was his honest response. Likewise, Hughes seem to make it all up as he went along, using any means necessary to crack fast bowlers into and over fences.
The story of Jackson’s slide into ill-health, while perhaps not unusual for the times, is no less moving now than it must have been eight decades ago. Dating most unfavourably is the decision of Australia’s Board of Control to have a doctor preemptively remove the young star’s tonsils before he’d even set off on his maiden Ashes voyage of 1930, wary of the tonsillitis Bill Ponsford had suffered on the previous tour.
Jackson had sealed his selection for that trip in a trial game at the SCG, blazing an astonishing 182, during which he uprooted a fence picket with one blow. Photographs from that innings depict Jackson’s slender frame launching itself into thunderous drives and cuts but it and the 82 he made in the second innings took it out of the young star, already feeling the effects of his as-yet undiagnosed illness.
Thus he showed only the briefest glimpses of his best and remained an enigma to English crowds. His best was a brave, four-and-a-half-hour 73 in a match-turning 243-run stand with Bradman in the final Test on a spiteful Oval surface, when Larwood’s brutalisation of the Australian pair planted some of the seeds of what came in the Bodyline summer of two years later.
Jackson’s deterioration was swift and saddening. During the 1930-31 West Indies visit, continued ill health and an accompanying dip in form meant he was dropped twice from the Test side by the end of the summer. His only happiness that season came during New South Wales’ trip to Brisbane, when he was introduced to actor and one-time ballet dancer Phyllis Thomas, who’d soon become his fiancee.
Golf, tennis and ill-advised cricketing comebacks were frequent in Jackson’s final years. Omitted from his state’s season-opening side of 1931-32 in Brisbane after coughing up blood before the game, he was rushed to a Brisbane hospital and at the insistence of the Board of Control, was soon installed at a sanitorium in the Blue Mountains. Months later, in defiance of both the New South Wales Cricket Association and various doctors, he moved to a quieter cottage of his own and then on to Brisbane to be closer to Phyllis and where he wrongly assumed the warmer climate would restore his health.
Not knowing he had only months to live, Jackson unleashed one last flurry of runs for Northern Suburbs at the start of the Brisbane club cricket summer of 1932-33, averaging over 150 in his seven games in front of the thousands of spectators who’d come to watch him bat. These last, doomed flourishes of the ailing genius left opponents with the heartbreaking dilemma; run out a gasping Jackson as he flayed their bowling attacks around but struggled between the wickets or, as Frith put it, “spare him so that his obsessive but self-destructive love of batting could continue to be gratified; a harrowing choice of mercies”.
Defiant until the last, Jackson saw himself as merely biding time before he would qualify for Queensland’s Sheffield Shield side and then force his way back into the Test team to face Jardine’s MCC tourists. Her heart slowly breaking as the disease spread through both of Archie’s lungs, Phyllis announced that the pair were married a week after her 21st birthday. By then, a steady stream of visitors arrived fearing the worst and even amid the acrimony of that Bodyline summer, Jardine’s men remained fond enough of their opponent to gather at Jackson’s hospital bedside in the days leading up to the Brisbane Test. Before that game was even finished, just after midnight on 16 February, 1933, Archie Jackson had lost his final battle.
Australia was stunned by his passing. Players wore black armbands. Flags flew at half-mast. Jackson’s casket was spirited back to Sydney on the same coach of the mail train carrying the Australian and English sides, disbelieving that they’d never see their friend again, let alone savour his wondrous strokemaking. At the funeral service the pall-bearers – Bradman, Woodfull, McCabe and Ponsford among them – laid Jackson to rest within sight of the orchard where not so long before he’d pilfered apples as a cheeky schoolboy. Among the tributes that followed, none summed the man up as succinctly as the quote on Jackson’s gravestone: “He played the game.”
It’s harder in this age to imagine a time when the memory of Phil Hughes will need to be revived, so keenly was his death felt around the world, and he will be remembered differently than most Australian cricketers; with an eternal sense of longing and a lump in the throat. To those who watched this fearless boy wonder flay Dale Steyn and Morne Morkel to all corners of the ground in that Durban Test of 2009, he could surely never be forgotten.
Once, at the request of officials during a game for E.L. Waddy’s side against Northern Tasmania at Launceston, a young Archie Jackson obligingly wore a red sash around his waist so that scorers might tell he and his accomplished partner Alan Kippax apart as they both pressed on past the century mark. Such an event surely never transpired in Phillip Hughes’s career. Truthfully, nobody else batted quite like him.
