THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
JO N AH J ON E S Leonard Jonah Jones (1919-2004)
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Jonah Jones was a significant artist, writer and educator, who will be best remembered for his carved sculpture and lettering, and his stained glass. Though born in County Durham, he was of Welsh extraction, and increasingly engaged with that inheritance. His treatment of Welsh related subject matter and Welsh-language texts was essential to his half-century career in Wales.
important early commissions, but then contracted tuberculosis, and had to spend five years in a sanatorium. In 1955, while convalescing, he converted to Catholicism, and this led to some major commissions for stained-glass windows and carvings, including a Madonna and Child for Ampleforth Abbey in North Yorkshire in 1960. He also began to produce busts of a number of eminent sitters, including John Cowper Powys (1956) and Bertrand Russell (1959).
Leonard Jonah Jones was born in Wardley, a colliery village in County Durham, on 17 February 1919. He was the eldest of four children of a former miner of Welsh extraction. Though he ended his grammar school education at the age of 16, he attended evening classes at the King Edward VII School of Art in Newcastle upon Tyne, and it was there that Leonard Evetts introduced him to the art of lettering.
During the 1960s and 1970s, Jones worked abroad, first as a teacher at the British School in Rome, then as an external assessor to colleges in Northern Ireland, and finally, in the years 1974-78, as both Director of the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, and Director of Kilkenny Design Workshops. He was also artist in residence at Newcastle University, in 1979-80, and Gregynog arts fellow at the University of Wales in 1981.
As a conscientious objector, Jones responded to the Second World War by joining the 224 Parachute Field Ambulance, within the 6th Airborne Division, in 1944. He joined this field ambulance unit specifically to meet John Petts, a painter and wood engraver, whose illustration to a story by Dylan Thomas he had seen in The Listener. Together with John Ryder, a typographer and book designer, they set up a printing press at RAF Ringway, in Cheshire, and printed instructional material for trainee parachutists. Another early wartime experience also indicated his future direction as, stationed on Exmoor, he took a walk with a Welsh soldier and began to realise the importance of his own Cambrian inheritance. He was involved in the Ardennes campaign, from late 1944, and the airdrop over the Rhine at Wesel in March 1945. On reaching Belsen in the April, he realised that his position as a pacifist was untenable. At the end of the war, Jones served at Mount Carmel College, an army education centre in Palestine. There, in 1946, he met and married Ida Grossman, a committed Zionist, who later wrote under the pen name, ‘Judith Maro’. He returned to Britain with her in June 1947, and they settled first on Tyneside before moving to Llanystumdwy in Caernarfonshire. There he worked with John Petts at the Caseg Press, under the patronage of Lady Lloyd George. When there proved to be little demand for the type of limited editions that he and Petts had planned, Jones undertook a six-week intensive course at Eric Gill’s former workshop, at Pigotts, Buckinghamshire, in 1949, on a small scholarship from the York Trust. In particular, he studied letter cutting in stone from Laurence Cribb and ‘the finer points of putting lead through the stick’ from Gill’s son-in-law, René Hague (Stephens 2004). This enabled him to open his own workshop at Tremadoc on the Lleyn Peninsula in Gwynedd. He and his family lived firstly at Pentrefelin and then at a house on the Dwryd estuary close to Portmeirion, where he began a long friendship with its architect, Clough Williams-Ellis. He fulfilled some
In later life, Jones concentrated on literary projects, both as a writer and a letterer. He published two novels – A Tree May Fall (1980) and Zorn (1987) – an illustrated study of The Lakes of North Wales (1983), a book of autobiographical essays entitled The Gallipoli Diary (1989) and a biography of Clough Williams-Ellis (1998). He also contributed several designs for books for the Gregynog Press, including Lament for Llewelyn the Last (1982). His last 13 years were spent in Llandaff, Cardiff, and, while he was no longer able to work with heavy sculpture, he still painted. In 2002, he was honoured with a retrospective exhibition at St David’s Hall. Dying on 29 November 2004, he was survived by his wife and three children. Having received the Queen’s Jubilee Medal for service in the arts in 1983, Jones was posthumously awarded an honorary membership of the Royal Society of Architects, Wales. His public commissions include work for the chapels of Ampleforth College (North Yorkshire), Loyola Hall, Rainhill, (Merseyside), Ratcliffe College (Leicestershire) and St Patrick’s Catholic Church, Newport (Monmouthshire). Further reading: Euan Cameron, ‘Jonah Jones. Letter carver and artist, he learned his craft at Eric Gill’s workshops’, Guardian, 14 January 2005 [obituary]; Peter Jones, Jonah Jones: An Artist’s Life, Brigend: Seren, 2011; Meic Stephens, ‘Jonah Jones. Artist-craftsman in the tradition of Eric Gill’, Independent, 2 December 2004 [obituary]