Sir Stanley Jackson captained Harrow School, Cambridge University, and England in a golden epoch of English cricket. It is no bad thing to place the man and his age in perspective before the telling of his story. Our subject played his cricket in an age lost to us forever, an age wreathed in legend. 

F.S. Jackson was prodigiously talented in everything he chose to do; not only was he one of the game’s finest all-rounders - after W.G. Grace the finest all-round amateur cricketer who has ever stepped onto the field; he was a businessman and soldier who later went on to be chairman of the Tory party and governor of Bengal, where he survived an assassination attempt in 1932. 

He first played for England in 1893 and from then until the end of his career aged 35 in 1905 he was an automatic choice for any English Test Match side either for his batting or his bowling. 

Gathering together an abundance of anecdotes and statistics, James Philip traces Jackson’s phenomenal cricketing achievements from early successes at prep, school to the triumphant Test series against Joe Darling’s Australians in 1905. 

If you have never heard of Sir Stanley Jackson suffice it to say that in his Test career, hit five centuries against Australia on English soil - a feat equaled by one man, Geoffrey Boycott, but yet to be bettered in the 112 years since - and who, with the help of George Hirst, once bowled out the Australians for just 23 in 1902. 

Introducing us to the other characters of the era - W.G. Grace, C.B. Fry, Ranji, Archie MacLaren, and Lord Hawke - this is a compelling account both of Jackson the man, the player and of his time, the Golden Age of English cricket. 

In this uniquely comprehensive cricketing biography of the most English of Yorkshiremen, the author gives us a ball-by-ball commentary on the life of arguably England’s finest captain. 

No story about the golden age of cricket would be complete without F.S. Jackson, and no biography of F.S. Jackson complete without a portrait of the age in which he played. 

Here then is his story.