Jackson family of Lymm

Two sons and one grandson of Peter and Eleanor Jackson, Primitive Methodists of Statham, Lymm, Cheshire, served in the PM ministry.

Charles Jackson (1819-1863; e.m. 1840) served for two years as an auxiliary local preacher in the Warrington circuit before becoming a full-time itinerant. Ill health forced him to retire in 1862 to the Isle of Man, his wife's home. He took a small farm at Kirk Michael, but died on 22 September 1863.

Another son James Dodd Jackson (1835-1907; e.m. 1854) lived for a time with his brother Charles in Manchester and attended the Rosamond Street PM chapel, becoming a local preacher in 1851. He gave up an apprenticeship to become an auxiliary local preacher in 1853 and a probationer the following year, and was ordained in 1858. A notable ministry in northern circuits, though twice interrupted by bouts of aphonia, brought him to connexional notice and in 1885 he was elected to Conference. In 1888 he became Conference Secretary and the following year permanent secretary of the Local Preachers' Provident Society. He was President of the 1897 Conference and during his year of office opened the new Hartley College in Manchester. He retired to Appleby in 1900 and, after a brief return to the full work, finally retired to Kirkby Stephen, where he died on 31 December 1907.

James Jackson's son James Dodd Jackson (1861-1918; e.m. 1883) was born on 9 December 1861 at Darlington. Following the death of both his daughter and his wife in 1894, he took a recuperative Mediterranean voyage, visiting both the Holy Land and Egypt. He had literary gifts, writing stories set in Garsdale and written in the local dialect, which appeared in the Aldersgate Magazine and the Primitive Methodist Leader, collected under the title Twixt Moor and Mead; and in 1897 he helped to write his father's Presidential address. In 1906 he was appointed assistant editor of the connexional magazines and from 1911 to 1916 was connexional editor. In 1912 he gave the Hartley Lecture, on preaching, The Message and the Man. In retirement at Tunbridge Wells he continued to write, using the pseudonym 'Lucius Lyte', in the Aldersgate Primitive Methodist Magazine He declined nomination to the Presidency in 1917 in favour of an older candidate. He was taken ill during a visit to Lymm and died in Tunbridge Wells on 9 December 1918.

Sources
  • PM Magazine, 1898 pp.2-5
  • Michael N. Jackson, in WHS Proceedings 38 (1971-72) pp.8-15