Britain is no longer a country for and says "Farewell" to Francis Jackson, Giant of 20th Century Organ Recitalists

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In the second half of the last century Francis commanded the world of English church music as the virtuoso organist in the Gothic cathedral of York Minster and as a prolific composer. In the process, he thrilled tens of thousands, both in Britain and abroad, with his music. He continued to play and compose, way past his retirement and deep into old age. His colleague Simon Lindley, organist of Leeds Parish Church, summed him when he said : 

“The affection in which FJ is held by so many throughout the world stems not only from his professional distinction and musical brilliance, but also from a disarmingly modest personality – always big-hearted and immensely caring of his fellow men.” 

                         Theodore Dubois 'Toccata' played by Francis at York Minster (linked)

Francis, who has died at 104, was born during the First World War in the Autumn of 1917 in the market town of Malton, North Yorkshire. He was the son of Eveline May, a talented pianist and William, the local borough engineer and sanitary inspector who, as Francis said : “Was in charge of roads and drainage. He had an office in the town hall”. Both parents sang in the choir of St. Michael's Church in the centre of town and he was named after his father's elder brother, Francis, who had died of dysentery, as a soldier earlier in the War. 

His mother was second cousin to Elsie Suddaby, who was a leading British soprano of the inter-war years and had been a pupil of Sir Edward Bairstow, who would later play a major role in the musical life of Francis himself.(link) Proud of his Yorkshire heritage, he always described himself as “a lad from the Wolds”, but didn't have a strong Yorkshire accent and said that. when he joined the Army to fight in the Second World War at the age of 21 in 1940 he : "Was more than once questioned as to : Why coming from Yorkshire, I didn't betray the fact ? The simple truth is that I followed my parents' example, father's particularly. He was the son of a vicarage in the days when all parsons spoke in 'cultured tones'. My father's eldest sister, a tiny, formidable lady, paid us an annual visit and she was exceedingly vigilant where her brother's children's behaviour was concerned. Also, she was watchful for any 'rough Yorkshire talk' that might be creeping in and that made an impression".

With his family background it isn't surprising that Francis said that he couldn't remember being unable to play the piano and, like the rest of the family, he soon became an enthusiastic listener to gramophone records and with his brother, Paul, like his parents, joined the church choir at St Michael's. Of his playing Francis said : “I was born with a natural talent and working at it and developing it was pretty well unalloyed pleasure” and : "My musical gifts were discovered early. To whoever’s house I was taken, I was sure to be asked to play the piano. Very often the company talked throughout my efforts". At the same time Paul, his elder brother, occasionally showed  concern that his little brother would become "swelled headed" and "was determined I shouldn’t and always took the opportunity to take me down a peg. I think I became very sensitive to this and tried my best to appear as unremarkable as possible”. 

In 1928, at the age of eleven, he came to the notice of the York Minster organist, Sir Edward Bairstow, who at Francis's audition for a place in the Choir, spotted talent of a high order in his piano playing and enrolled him as a chorister at the Minster.(link) He was admitted to the full choir after only three weeks as a probationer rather than the full year and his parents bought him a Welmar baby grand piano that was to remain in his possession for the rest of his life.(link)  

Francis was introduced to radio broadcasting at this early age because Choral Evensong was broadcast live from the Minster once a week on a Tuesday.(link)  After attending the National School in Malton, he was now attending secondary school, but at 14, he left and became one of Sir Edward's full-time students and later said : "I think my articles with him were generously defrayed by 'Friends of the Minster Choir', whose munificence I value still". 

Each week, on a Tuesday, he took part in the choral evensong which was broadcast live from the Minster by BBC Radio accompanied by Sir Edward at the organ, with rehearsal having taken place outside the Minster, with him at the piano. Francis went on to have harmony, counterpoint and organ lessons with him and regarded him as : "My example and inspiration". Others did not see him quite in the same light and rather as "the rudest man in Yorkshire", but Francis put this down to Sir Edward's extreme sensitivity, especially against pretension in any shape or form and was always quick to support his teacher. Francis would later record Sir Edward's complete organ works, despite his - Sir Edward's, aversion to the gramophone and he published his biography, in 1996, fifty years after his death.

In 1935, at the age of 16, Francis became the organist at At Michael's in Malton and also played in the York Minster services, including two complete services a week in that summer – a remarkable achievement for a teenager. When he was 21, in 1940, he was asked to play the organ live for a BBC Radio broadcast. The piece was the setting of the 'Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis' by Herbert Howells' and he had no time to rehearse and recalled that he he'd : "Never encountered that music before because I'd never sung it as a chorister".(link)

As a fan of the French composer Maurice Ravel, (link) in the same year, on his newly bought gramophone, he played the 'Ravel String Quartet', recorded by the 'Galimir Quartet' in the composer’s presence.(link) In 1935 Ravel was sixty and had only two more years to live. Francis said, that with his youthful enthusiasm : "I couldn’t have enough of it. What I considered the weird, spooky harmonies gripped and fascinated me". 

Francis was admitted to the Fellowship of the Royal College of Organists in 1937 and continued to receive tuition from Sir Edward until his 'call up' to serve in the Army in the Second World War in 1940. He later said : "It was a pretty awesome prospect of course, to one in a sheltered situation like I was. It was the making of me, I think".(link) 

He now trained as a trooper in the tank regiment, the 9th Queen's Royal Lancers and was based near Dorking. He wrote to Sir Edward to let him know where he was and he said he replied and wrote that : "'Vaughan Williams is in Dorking - go and see him'. So I got in touch with him on a very bad line and arranged to go and see him on a day and have a lovely tea party with him and his wife".(link) 

Francis now embarked on five years continuous service, during which time 143 members his Regiment lost their lives. Action started when it landed and fought against the German forces led by General Rommel in North Africa in September 1941 and went on to undertake a leading part in the First Battle of El Alamein in July the following year. Here, after intensive training, it used, to great effect, the new American Sherman Tanks with their 75-mm guns to knock out enemy tanks.

On his own admission, Francis didn’t make a particularly good soldier. He said : “I tried my best, but it wasn’t really what I was cut out for ”. More than once he found himself getting a severe dressing down from an NCO who, although : “They were largely good chaps, but there was the occasional person who felt that in order to keep the initiative he had to be as brutal as possible”. 

In April 1941, the German General Rommel's main force reached Sollum and occupied the Halfaya Pass, known to the troops as 'Hell-fire Pass', in North West Egypt and his Regiment were involved in Allied attempts to recapture the pass and relieve the city of Tobruk in Libya. He  He remembered this, of all the things he witnessed in the War, as : 'The grimmest episode of all. It was searingly hot, and there was a wind blowing sand everywhere. The sand got into your hair, your eyes and ears and the thirst was the worst that could be imagined and all the time the noise of the engagement, each side trying to blow the other to bits – and to what purpose?' He repeated this, when being interviewed over a cup of coffee, over 70 years later : “It was simply blowing each-other to bits, and for what reason?”

Francis later said that he regarded one of his first compositions, 'Tree at My Window', set to the poem by Robert Frost, written in the desert campaign when the Regiment were approaching the Battle of Tobruk, as one of his best. (link) He remembered writing it : “In my tent by the light of an oil lamp made from a cigarette tin. There is a bit where the wind blows in the song and it was actually blowing quite a gale in the desert at the time. I know I kept wondering if the tent was going to fly off”.

'But tree, I have seen you taken and tossed,

And if you have seen me when I slept,

You have seen me when I was taken and swept

And all but lost'.                                                  '

In January 1943, as part of General Montgomery's Eight Army his Regiment entered the city of Tripoli in Italian Libya after the Germans withdrew their forces after a short siege. It was while he was here that his brother Paul, who was also out there as a sergeant in the Royal Air Force, came looking for him and tried various appellations – "Jackson? Francis? Frank?", without success. When he then mentioned that his brother played the piano, he received the positive reply : "Oh, you mean 'Fingers'". By now Francis had taken up the saxophone and accordion and became known among the men for his 'Jive with Jackson' and 'Francis Jackson plays Boogie and Bach' sessions and he began to wonder whether, after the War was over, whether light music might be where his future lay. 

He was still 'organ-minded' enough to track down and play the Cavaillé-Coll instrument in the newly liberated city of Tunis in the Cathedral of St. Vincent de Paul, where he was asked by the verger to play the 'National Anthem' on Easter Sunday. When the Regiment reached the town of Forli, in the Abbey of San Mercuriale in Italy, he also played and was accompanied by monks in their habits playing strings. 

In 1944, during one of her tours for the American Army fighting in North Africa, he met the movie star Marlene Dietrich, who was performing for Allied troops in Algeria in 1944 and later made an appearance in Italy.(link) She was at an officers’ dance and he said the men : "Fell over one another in wanting to dance with her". Despite the fact that Francis had remained a trooper and was not an officer he was present, possibly in a musical capacity and after he had his dance with her, she turned to him and said : "Thank you. That was wonderful". Over 70 years later, when he was asked "whether she was very glamorous ?" He replied : "No. She was very nice". The confidence which four years of Army had given him can be clearly seen in the photo taken at this time.

A love of poetry and literature generally was nourished during his War service when fellow troopers introduced him to the writings of Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood and W H Auden. He later said that the practitioners of language were as significant as the orchestral techniques of Berlioz or his beloved Ravel who : "Set up a magic in sound like the master orchestrators that they are. It's the same with writers and words". In his later years Francis was widely-known as a devotee of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. 

In Italy in August, while sitting by the seashore at San Vito he composed his second favourite work and said : " The 'Impromptu' I wrote in Italy for Sir Edward Bairstow attaining his 70th birthday. That is also special to me as my first published work". (link) In September his Regiment saw action at San Savino in fighting against German forces on the Italian Front, when it formed the spearhead of the British Eighth Army in the breakthrough to the River Po in the Spring of 1945 and German prisoners were taken after the Battle.

In 1945 he wrote to his mother saying : ‘I feel there are more ways of getting a living at music than burying yourself in a church or playing hymns all the year round’. He still loved the organ, but regretted that it had ‘only Bach’s fugues in its repertoire in the line of really great music’. In the event, the prospect of a career at York Minster put paid to the formation of any dreams of creating a post-war 'Frank Jackson and the Malton Melodists Band'.

Back in Britain and with the return of peace, Francis was demobbed from the Army in 1946 and found that the Minster now needed an 'Assistant Organist'. On Sir Edward's say say-so and that of the Dean, Eric Milner-White, Francis was appointed without interview and, ten days later, on the death of Sir Edward, he took over as the Minster's Organist and Choir Master. Sir Edward, who had been in the job for 33 years, had advised Francis that he had the choice to become either a “musical GP” or “jack of all trades”. 

Francis said : "Milner-White loved beauty in all its manifestations. We held very productive weekly meetings as Dean and Organist. He had a wide knowledge of the repertoire and was very particular". According to a profile in 'Cathedral Music', the Dean thought that Francis was a nice young man who might be expected to do as he was told, but 'soon showed a healthy independence' in his choice of music. In addition, in his early days, Francis made a number of recordings with the Minster choir, but the Dean, the great traditionalist, opposed any more during the 1950s and early 1960s. Francis found his successor as Dean in 1975, Ronald Jasper, even more difficult to work with and was disappointed when he swept away the Minster’s traditional Sunday pattern of sung Mattins followed by a great Solemn Eucharist. 

Choir rehearsals under Francis were both professional and relaxed and his approach was very different to that of Sir Edward, even though he consciously adopted Sir Edward's seated stance at the piano (right). The newspaper music critic, Ernest Bradbury, wrote in 'The Musical Times' that : 'As a choir trainer he gains by persuasion and sweet reasonableness what his illustrious teacher and predecessor achieved by intellectual rigour and sheer dominating force'. Francis maintained that one of the great pleasures of his life was to  accompany the Minster Choir in full song and he said that it was : "Such a privilege”.(link) The live broadcasts of the choir, by the BBC, continued and the one on Christmas Day in 1963 was directed by Francis with Ronald Perrin on the organ.(link)

Although kept busy by his Minster activities with choir rehearsals and daily services, Francis also found time to be involved in the musical life of the City of York and, in particular, he conducted the York Symphony Orchestra and the York Musical Society, the oldest musical society in the country. The Society had fallen out with Sir Edward in 1939 and Francis welcomed them back to the Minster for the traditional Palm Sunday performance of Bach’s 'St Matthew Passion'. 

He had known Priscilla Proctor since the mid-1930s, when they took part in amateur theatricals at Malton. She was a Quaker and had been private secretary to Lord Halifax. They were married on All Saints’ Day 1950 and the following year visited Ravel’s house at Montfort l’Amaury, during a holiday in France. Ravel’s housekeeper Madame Reveleau was still in residence and Francis recalled : “It was a remarkable thing to meet her who had been in such close touch with him. As remarkable as seeing the things he had had around him, exactly as he had left them”. When interviewed at the age of 101, he recalled that many years before this Ravel's music had taken him "by the throat".(link) 

He now found that, as an outstanding organist and one of the foremost recitalists of his generation, he was in demand in other parts of the country and in 1956 he gave his first recital on the new organ in the Royal Festival Hall, London. He decided to open Bach’s 'Prelude and Fugue in D major BWV 532' with what he later called a  : “Dicey solo pedal scale” which was either a : "Brave (or foolhardy)” decision.(link) The following year he played Poulenc’s 'Organ Concerto' under Basil Cameron at the Royal Albert Hall Proms and made further appearances in 1960 and 1964. That same year he obtained his DMus from the University of Durham and thereafter he was known throughout the organ fraternity as “the Doctor”.

In his productive 1950s and 60s he composed on his piano and said : "It was Ravel who said that without a piano you cannot invent new harmonies. At Minster Court (the organist's house at York) I used to have a small piano high up just under the roof, and Priscilla would fend off callers while I was putting pencil to paper". In 1957, for example, he wrote, for an Old Choristers’ reunion, a hymn tune called 'East Acklam', after the North Yorkshire village where he lived. However, it was not until the Methodist hymn-writer, Fred Pratt Green wrote “For the Fruits of His Creation” for it in 1970, that it achieved great popularity and wide use as a harvest hymn.(link) In addition his large output of Anglican sacred music included the frequently used 'Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis in G Minor' (link) and his Six 'Organ Sonatas'.(link) 

In 1961 his music achieved worldwide prominence with his final Toccata of Widor’s Fifth Organ Symphony, which he recommended to the Duke of Kent and his bride to be, Katharine Worsley, as the outgoing music for their wedding at York Minster.(link) With its plenitude of bravura fingerwork, he was to set a challenge for generations of church organists to come. Of his own playing, his Leeds-based peer, Simon Lindley, praised the : “Magical colouring, depth of expression and technical control”. 

As a composer, Francis wrote not only church music, but a symphony, an organ concerto, chamber music, songs, and incidental music for plays.(link) In 1962 he unusually composed, in collaboration with the actor-dramatist John Stuart Anderson,  'Daniel in Babylon', a monodrama with narrator to celebrate the consecration of Coventry Cathedral. He did the same five years later with 'A Time of Fire' for the Norwich and Norfolk Triennial Festival. 

Through all this, his enthusiasm for dance bands remained a secret pleasure, for fear that it would be deemed incompatible with a career in church music. As he said : “Otherwise one would be considered to be going to the bad and to be unfit for a professional life in so-called ‘classical’ music”. In later life, as a devotee of the BBC’s Big Band Special presented by Sheila Tracy, he was inseparable from his radio on Monday nights and a sticker on the door of his garden studio proudly, but discreetly  proclaimed his membership of the BBC Big Band Club. (link) He was also a lover of the music of Billy Mayerl, pianist and composer who built a career in music hall and musical theatre and became an acknowledged master of light music.(link)

Francis had been well-pleased with the rebuilding and improvement of the Minster Organ by a former 'Assistant', Geoffrey Coffin, and further rebuilding, under his own supervision, was carried out in 1959-60. This in turn saw Francis was increasingly in demand for his advice on organ design in other churches and his more outstanding instruments were those at St Helen’s York and Blackburn Cathedral, the latter inspiring him to compose several large-scale works for it. 

When it came to the Minster's organ, in the late 1960s, he became very concerned when faults were found in the Minster's foundations and it was known that the resulting underpinning would generate clouds of pernicious dust which could fatally damage the organ. As a result, he saw to it that it was protected by : "The largest polyethene bag in the world". In addition, a small railway had been laid to the west door in order to move the excavated debris out of the Minster. Apparently, the lay clerk instead of receiving the usual evensong instruction from Francis was treated to him announcing that :  "The 4.21 from the west door is now approaching the central tower".

Peer recognition came to Francis when he was 53 and was chosen as the President of the Royal College of Organists and served for two years in 1972. He retired from the Minster at the age of 65 in in 1982 after his 36 year tenure had eclipsed that of Sir Edward. In that time he had seen three Archbishops come and go, with Stuart Blanch, the fourth, still in office. However, during his life he had, in fact, known nine Archbishops, ranging from William Temple, between the World Wars, to Stephen Cottrell in the 21st century.

Francis estimated that during his career, he had performed more than 1,600 recitals and said : “I performed all over the place : the US, Australia, France, Denmark.” One of the joys of travelling, he said, was discovering and learning to play different organs because : “No two organs are the same and the acoustics play a part. he size of the building, the seating capacity, they are all different”. It was, however, the organ at York Minster that he classified as "superb" and “One of the best organs there is.” 

In 1997, when he was invited to compose a new tune to words of his choice for use at BBC Choral Evensong broadcast from the Minster on the eve of his eightieth birthday, he recalled his already composed 'Stradsett'. He said : "It's called after the tiny hamlet of that name south of King's Lynn where a relative lived. I stopped the car and wrote it down without any words in mind". It was agreed that the hymn-writer Caryl Micklem would supply the words which Francis said : "He did, brilliantly, in a couple of days; lovely words, with musical connotations".

Early Spring of 2000, at the age of 83, he could be found traipsing around York with an American Television crew filming about the early life of John Barry, the distinguished Hollywood composer, who was one of his pupils of in the early years of his tenure at the Minster. John, who died in 2011 at the age of  74 became known the world over as the composer behind the music of the James Bond movies from 'Dr, No' onwards.(link) He was a pupil at St Joseph's School in York when Francis gave him some private fruition. He recalled : "I didn't give him all that many lessons. They lasted an hour – harmony and counterpoint". When he was told that in John's entry in Who's Who, he credited Francis with his musical education, his response was an incredulous and typically understated : " Really?"

Francis was still playing the organ at the age of  one hundred in 2019 (link) and had published his autobiography, 'Music for a Long While', adapting the title of Purcell’s famous song, when he was 96 in 2013. Eighty years before, under Sir Edward's guidance he said : 

“My horizons were widened and I learned that music was not just an exercise merely to be got through, but rather a natural expression of one’s very being. Bairstow made music alive and, above all, enjoyable and fulfilling and music had to be beautiful”(link)

Prelude & Fugue in G major (Joh. Seb. Bach) : played by Francis at York Minster in 1966 (linked)