The Gallipoli Diary

Though we are out of stock, copies are available from the Scene and Word website.

The Gallipoli Diary is a collection of essays and memoirs by Jonah Jones, one of our leading sculptors.

Very much a man of his times, the essays reflect Jones’s life from humble beginnings, his service as a field medic in the war, and his new life afterwards as an artist, threatened at the outset by acute tuberculosis. They show, too, his artistic credo: his adherence to the workshop rather than the studio, the classical and ancient sources of his work, and contemporary influences such as Mann, Klee, Brancusi, Noguchi and David Jones.

There are also portraits of Jones’s friends and neighbours in north Wales: Bertrand Russell, Clough Williams-Ellis, John Cowper Powys, Huw Wheldon, Richard Hughes; and one of Jacob, the Biblical figure who almost obsesses the artist.

In an essay-letter to his editor, Jonah Jones looks at the origins of his novels, ‘Zorn’ and ‘A Tree May Fall’. In other essays he discusses his struggle for a Welsh identity, and compares his father’s ‘little war’ of the Gallipoli diary with his own experiences at war there thirty years later. Through these essays and journals Jonah Jones shows us what it is like to have lived as an artist and man in the twentieth century.