In 2011, Seren published Jonah Jones – An Artist’s Life. The author is Peter Jones, also known as Pedr Jones, a 30-year-long contributor to Radio Cymru and S4C. The book, a full testament to a full life, opens with an introduction by Jan Morris. The Morris home has not only paintings, books and a slate name-plate of Jonah Jones but also a gravestone-in-waiting. Pedr Jones ends his book with three pages of bibliography and five pages of catalogue. The names of Wales’ twentieth century run through the Jonah Jones legacy: Gwynfor Evans, Saunders Lewis, Lord Morris of Borth-y-Gest, John Cowper Powys, Clough Williams-Ellis.

Richness of detail is the oxygen of good writing and Peter Jones creates it over the course of his father’s life. His parents met during the time of military service just prior to the formation of Israel. Jones was introduced to his future wife Judith by a major in the 1st Royal Ulster Rifles by name of Huw Wheldon. From his camp to the family home on Haifa’s Mount Carmel was a distance of sixty-five miles, a journey undertaken on an army motorbike. Peter Jones captures the atmosphere after the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. A young woman in a Tel Aviv street spits on Jonah Jones. While on a bus a girl tells her friend not to sit “next to a dirty Nazi anti-semite.” Jones is able to reply in the meticulous Hebrew that he has learnt.   

The episode is all the more ironic when set aside the most searing experience of Jones’ wartime years. He was among a group of medical staff to enter the newly liberated camp of Bergen-Belsen. It left “an ineradicable mental scar”. A half-century on, in 2002, the effect of the series Band of Brothers on television caused him to weep. “It was so authentic, so exactly what it was like,” he wrote.

Jones had already seen war. In France he was tasked to bury a soldier. The corpse in mid-winter being frozen solid, the grave-diggers were obliged to break the bones. He and his comrades sheltered from attack by mortar and dive bomber. “The terror was still vivid fifty years later,” writes Peter Jones. Jones senior was moved to the south of Holland to see that country’s terrible time of famine. His job was to fumigate the citizen population, infested with lice and scabies, with DDT powder. The crossing of the Rhine Jonah Jones himself later wrote about in a 2000-word essay “The Bloodstone Ring” in 1999.

Peter Jones covers the life before the war service in an economical twelve page first chapter “Child of the Depression: 1919-1939”. Jones’ father, Norman, was a survivor of Gallipoli and the Somme but gassed and wounded in the head at Vimy Ridge. A brother, born in 1920, died at four months, “possibly”, writes Peter Jones, “due to malnutrition during a pit strike.” A sister developed rickets as a result of underfeeding. In Felling, Northumberland water came from a standpipe and the outdoor water closets were cleared once a week by men on a cart and then disinfected with carbolic.

Jonah Jones was aged seven at the time of the General Strike. The strike itself ended in May but the miners stayed out until October. It meant constant hunger alleviated by the daily visit to the soup kitchen. There was a supply of vegetables and rhubarb from an allotment. The boy helped out by visiting the refuse from the earth closets “riddling it for coke-like cinders.” When a dentist in the next century commented on the small size of his teeth the artist’s reply was simple: “I was a child of the Depression”.

Jonah Jones at the outbreak of war opted for Conscientious Objector status and he was directed towards forestry work. In 1943, he enlisted with non-combatant status, but Peter Jones describes the forestry period in Kirkcudbrightshire, Wensleydale and Somerset as crucial. The demanding work built him up physically but he also saw nature close-up and in seasonal detail. He re-read Hardy and Lawrence. 

The life of the artist began after release from the army. It was writing that first lured him, digging deep into Felling Library. The result of his research into Tyneside history and culture was “Coaly Tyne”, “remarkable for its scholarship and the thoroughness of research that it reveals.”

The visual arts were ignited by the acquaintanceship with John Petts from his army days. Petts’ curatorship at Llanystumdwy’s Museum prompted the move to Wales. The first home was a half-wrecked cottage, Bron y Foel, a half-mile up a track and first spotted in pouring rain. The work, a six miles cycle ride one way, to Petts’ Caseg Press paid sixteen pounds a month.

Meanwhile, the impact of Belsen went beyond the psychological. Chronic tuberculosis, most likely contracted at the camp, rendered him an invalid for a year. The description of the treatment, a cause of shudder to read, is an echo of that which Derek Lindsay put into his classic novel The Rack. The artificial pneumothorax treatment required a needle inserted through the ribs without anaesthetic. After this appalling interval he renewed the artistic career, becoming in 1953 a member of the Guild of Memorial Craftsmen.  

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Read the full review here on the Wales Arts Review website.