Francis Alan Jackson

Francis Alan Jackson was born in Malton, Yorkshire, on October 2, 1917. He was a chorister at York Minster under Edward Bairstow from 1929 to 1933 and became organist of St Michael’s, Malton, while still a teenager. He earned the Durham BMus and, in 1937, the Fellowship of the Royal College of Organists with the Limpus Prize. After wartime service, he succeeded Bairstow as Organist and Master of the Music at York Minster in 1946, remaining in that post until 1982 and thereafter serving as Organist Emeritus. He also conducted the York Musical Society and York Symphony Orchestra and developed an international career as an organ recitalist.

Jackson composed choral, organ, orchestral, and chamber music as well as hymn tunes. He wrote EAST ACKLAM in 1957 as an alternative setting for an existing evening hymn, then revised his initial sketch before its first performance at the York Minster Old Choristers’ reunion that October. He named the tune for the village where he lived. It reached print in Hymns and Songs in 1969 with a different text; John Wilson’s subsequent request to Fred Pratt Green produced the 1970 harvest text now closely associated with it.

Durham awarded Jackson the DMus in 1957. He was appointed OBE in 1978 and CBE in 2007. York Minster remembered him as an internationally renowned recitalist, composer, and church musician. He died on January 10, 2022, aged 104.