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James Frederick Jackson was born in Mold, Flintshire (in North Wales) on 27th March 1894. He seems to have had an unhappy childhood, speaking little of it, but portioning blame upon his father, a master clogger from Yorkshire who left home sometime before 1901. At this time Jackson and his mother moved, first to Portsmouth where she took employment as a cook, then back to her native county of Norfolk and settled to run a boarding house in Hunstanton. Jackson suffered from ill health throughout much of his life, and most of his schooling came from his mother. Jackson was taken fossil collecting along the local cliffs from the age of about 6. He seems to have met various geologists in these years, amongst them Professor S. H. Reynolds (University of Bristol) 1867-1949, and communicated with many others including F.J. North (technician in King’s College, London until 1912, curator in the Natural History Museum, London from 1912-1914, then Assistant Keeper of Geology, National Museum of Wales).

Whilst he was out collecting he met Mr Bellerby Lowerinson, Principal of the nearby Ruskin School House who persuaded him to write an account of the local geology which was published in 1910. This seems to have resulted in Jackson gaining a few years attendance at the Ruskin School. He apparently worked hard at Maths and Latin, but his lack of earlier schooling meant he did not gain his matriculation certificate. A revised and expanded second edition of his booklet was published in 1911, with a recommended reading list which gives an insight into Jackson’s personal library. In his Afterword to this edition, Lowerinson mentions many letters of admiration and praise from “scientific men of great standing”.

From an early age he worked as a beach chair attendant and also as assistant to a house painter. He also seems to have both bought and sold specimens from at least 1910. His first major employment came in 1914, when he was appointed as General Assistant to the Geology Department at the National Museum of Wales for 25 shillings a week. In charge of Geology at the time was Dr F. J North, who was a great supporter of Jackson over many years. Much of the early work was based in 35 Park Place, adjacent to the museum, which was used as storerooms. When North was called up for military service in 1917, the Department of Geology was mothballed and Jackson was transferred to the Art department. However in March 1919, before the Geology Department resumed work again, he was dismissed (his employment was terminated – officially because of ‘rearrangements within the staff’). He does mention that he was very severely ill at the time with the ‘Spanish Flu’ which ravaged Britain at the time.

Despite his financial problems, Jackson still managed to take a holiday each year, to different parts of the country, where he would collect extensively. In 1919 he met Sydney Savoury Buckman in Dorset and was persuaded by him to write an appendix to Buckman’s Jurassic Chronology paper, based on his Junction Bed specimens. Jackson had collected extensively at Eypesmouth and made a detailed study of the complex stratigraphy, noting several undescribed species as well. This paper was eventually published in 1922 in the QJGS, and Jackson continued to work on the section, publishing a more detailed paper in 1926.

In 1923 Jackson became a Fellow of the Geological Society and also received an invitation to work as personal assistant to Mr Frank Morey, Secretary of the Isle of Wight Natural History and Archaeology Society, who he had met on a visit to the island 10 years before. In 1937 he was awarded £30 from the Lyell Fund of the Geological Society of London, and in 1942 he published ‘The geological story of the Isle of Wight’. In Nov 1935 Jackson was employed for two weeks to rearrange and catalogue the geological collections at the Lyme Regis Museum. They had fallen into a state of neglect due to the ill-health of the curator and he spent much time cleaning out rubbish as well as re-arranging cases, producing a catalogue and adding maps and labels to the displays.

In 1924 Jackson bought a cheap camera, and one of his hobbies was photographing geological features and sections. he presented 200 negatives to the British Association which were stored in Bristol Museum in 1940 and were destroyed in the WW2 air raid. Many of these photographs recorded sections and exposures that had since changed and were irreplaceable.

Jackson was left a little money in 1943 and left the Isle of Wight to buy an old small cottage near Llanberis in North Wales. In 1945 he moved once again, to a very small wooden bungalow near Paignton, Devon. Here he joined the Torquay Natural History Society and found plenty of work as a self-employed gardener. The bungalow was badly insulated so in 1951 he bought a small cottage in Charmouth, aided by W. D. Lang of the Natural History Museum, London. He started serious collecting from the local rocks, and his cottage soon became known as a place to visit in order to see his fossils – displayed on shelves had made himself from drift wood. In 1953 he started the accumulation of a series of fossils collected stratigraphically from the Blue Lias of Pinhay Bay through to the Fuller Earth at Burton Bradstock, including the Cretaceous outliers above. He was the first to discover the fossil insects in the Flatstone nodules of Stonebarrow Hill and denuded the beach below, splitting many hundredweights of hard limestone to find each insect. His 434 specimens were bought by the Natural History Museum of London and have been the subject of many publications since. In 1985, Paul Whalley split open an offcut and discovered the wing of a new very early lepidopteran. He also found ichthyosaur skulls, a very large slab of crinoids, a fine large Dapedium fish, and in 1954, part of a young Scelidosaurus - the Lyme dinosaur.

He maintained his contacts with other researchers and collectors and was always ready with advice. He helped Lang with his field-work and kept him informed of cliff falls and new specimens. He was filmed for an educational programme by the BBC in 1959, splitting open a nodule containing a fossil fish, and guiding the film crew along the beach. He continued to take holidays further afield, often to Scotland, sometimes Cornwall or North Wales, where he collected suites of rock for the National Museum of Wales. He thought nothing of collecting specimens weighing up to 14lbs, realizing that these were valuable for display purposes. He always carried very large hammers and other tools, and considered that this was how he managed to acquire some of his better specimens. The last of his collecting trips was at the age of 71 (1965), to Arran, and with a fortnight of persistent rain and rough winds, after which he apologised for only coming back with 50 specimens rather than his customary 200 or more. In 1959 he decided to transfer the bulk of his collections to the National Museum of Wales. 4700 specimens were transferred in July 1960, with a further 700 in 1965.

He died on Monday 19th Sept 1966 aged 72. As requested, his ashes were scattered over Carn Llidi, in West Wales by the Keeper of Geology at the National Museum of Wales.