Fairlight's Champion Deckhand

One of Manly’s most colourful sporting personalities was cricketer Sammy Woods, who, uniquely, represented Australia at cricket, and England at both cricket and rugby union. In 1925 he published his sporting reminiscences, which contained the following recollection.

As a boy in the early 1880s, Woods and his brothers travelled across to Sydney every day to school at Royston College, and every evening they returned to Manly on the ferry Fairlight. Sammy’s father, John Woods, was a person of some influence, a former Lord Mayor of Sydney, and he had engaged the champion boxer Larry Foley to give his sons a few boxing lessons. They regularly tested out their boxing prowess with one of the deckhands on the Fairlight, a tall, powerfully-built West Indian named Peter Jackson. The Woods boys told Foley how talented Jackson was, and Foley came along to see. One look told Foley that Jackson had the potential to be an outstanding boxer. “Train with me and I can make you champion of Australia,” he told Jackson, who quit his deckhand position, and took up boxing.
Sure enough, in 1886, Jackson won the Australian heavyweight crown, defeating Tom Lees in a thirty-round fight. Over the next few years he toured Australia and the USA, contesting nearly thirty fights, and was undefeated in all of them, including a 61-round slugfest with James J Corbett in San Francisco in 1891. Corbett became world champion the following year, but because of the racism in the sport at the time, Jackson was never able to gain a shot at the world heavyweight title. He died in Roma, Queensland in 1901, of tuberculosis, aged just 40.