Evan Gordon Newton Jones (29 December 1927 – 18 April 2023) was a Jamaican writer and poet, who lived and worked for much of his career in the United Kingdom. His body of work includes poems, plays, novels, anthologies of Jamaican folklore and motion-picture screenplays. His best-known scripts include The Damned (1962), King and Country (1964), Funeral in Berlin (1966), Two Gentlemen Sharing (1969), Wake in Fright (1971), Escape to Victory (1981) and Champions (1983) and his writing for theatre and television included work for the BBC, ITV and PBS.
Jones was born in Hector's River, Portland Parish, Jamaica, and was educated at Munro College, Haverford College and Wadham College, Oxford. After graduating from Haverford, he undertook relief work in Gaza with the American Friends Service Committee. At Oxford, he wrote "The Song of the Banana Man", a poem which combined Jamaican Patois with English metrical verse and became widely taught in the Caribbean and anthologised internationally.
Jones's professional career began in British television with The Widows of Jaffa and In a Backward Country, both produced by the BBC in the 1950s. In the 1960s he began a major collaboration with Joseph Losey, writing more of Losey's films than any other single screenwriter. He also wrote The Madhouse on Castle Street, a now-lost BBC television play featuring the acting debut of Bob Dylan, and later collaborated with Ted Kotcheff on Two Gentlemen Sharing and Wake in Fright, the latter of which came to be regarded as a landmark of the Australian New Wave.
In the 1970s Jones wrote the BBC/PBS documentary drama series The Fight Against Slavery, which he considered his major work and which won the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize in 1976. He later wrote the novels Stone Haven (1993), regarded as a classic of modern West Indian literature, and Alonso and the Drug Baron (2006). Jones was also a founder member of the Caribbean Artists Movement and wrote political and cultural columns for The Gleaner.
Jones was married first to the American actress Honora Fergusson and later to the English actress Joanna Vogel. He had two daughters, the novelists Melissa and Sadie Jones. He died in London on 18 April 2023, at the age of 95.
Early life
1927–1949: family and education Evan Jones was born on 29 December 1927 at Hector's River, Portland Parish, Jamaica. His father, Fred M. Jones, was a wealthy planter and Custos of Portland from 1965 until his death in 1971. His mother, Gladys Jones (née Smith), was an American Quaker missionary, social worker and educator. He was one of seven children and younger brother to the politician Kenneth Jones.
Jones was named after his great-grandfather, the Reverend Evan Jones, a Welsh clergyman who came to Jamaica in 1842, building Saint Thomas Anglican Church in Manchioneal, Portland. His parents were likewise greatly involved in their community as the Jones family's land covered 10,000 acres, employing a large number of local people from villages such as Duckenfield. His mother also ran Happy Grove Secondary School in Hector's River as both secretary of the board of governors and, at another time, its acting principal. Jones's parents instilled in him an early love for poetry and theatre: his father would recite poetry as he made the rounds of their estates; and his mother wrote and delivered sermons to her congregation. She also directed pageants, in which his father often acted. Jones grew up with his parents being public figures of great significance in the parish of Portland. In an interview given to Laura Tanna, writing for the Jamaica Journal, Jones said:I think because my parents were both very interesting and powerful [...] they had a strong sense of purpose. [...] We were all brought up to believe we had to be somebody and do something, in a very small way like the Kennedy family in the States. [...] It was your job as a human being, because you were born into the manor, to do something with it. [...] I chose to be a writer.
Jones was raised in rural eastern Jamaica and was educated as a child by a governess. From the age of nine, he was educated at the island's prestigious boarding school Munro College. When he was 12, Jones was taught English literature there by Reg Bunting, a Cambridge graduate and later headmaster of Wolmer's School, who inspired him to become a writer. Jones was also an avid athlete and footballer, playing as a forward alongside Lindy Delapenha to win the Olivier Shield in 1943. At 17, Jones went to the United States to attend the Quaker school Haverford College in Pennsylvania, where he majored in English and Spanish. There he found both academic and athletic success, earning the nickname "the educated toe": Jones was a varsity athlete, cricketer and captain of the football team, being named an All-American. He was also president of the Spanish Club and a member of the Founders' Club, a dining club of twelve members elected on the strength of their academic and extracurricular achievements. Jones was described in Haverford's 1949 yearbook as:Ev . . . the deadly boot that scored fifty goals . . . woos his women with Macbeth . . . "Now take my paper on Bergson" . . . poet and songster . . . called from the cricket field to pinch hit as high jumper . . . "I loathe inconstancy" . . . authority on the Jamaican rum industry . . . hopes for a look at Oxford's spires.
Jones began writing plays while at Haverford, his first was about the White Witch of Rose Hall, a Jamaican legend and duppy story previously novelised by H. G. de Lisser. His first play to be produced, Inherit this Land (Little Theatre Movement of Jamaica, 1950), was also written at Haverford.
1949: relief work in Palestine After graduating from Haverford in 1949, Jones volunteered with the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), who dispatched him to the Gaza Strip, Palestine, in the aftermath of the First Arab–Israeli War. He and two other Quaker volunteers sailed on a Dutch freighter and, once landed, travelled by bus to Cairo. They entered Gaza by train at the commencement of Eid al-Fitr. Under the auspices of the United Nations, refugee camps had been organised by the AFSC. Jones had previously provided similar relief work for the AFSC in Mexico and was therefore tasked with overseeing the distribution of food rations to the inhabitants of a camp of 30,000 refugees, natives and Bedouins at Khan Yunis.
Jones recruited a team of Arabs from the refugee population who aided him in his duties; he credited his Armenian translator as the real power behind his leadership. He also worked with an assistant, Mustafa, whose brother was a powerful Bedouin sheikh, known for his retainers' ability to smuggle themselves in and out of Gaza. Through this connexion, Jones inadvertently became involved in a blood feud when a spare tire was stolen from his Jeep while he attended one of the sheikh's several weddings. This resulted in resprisals by the sheikh's men who felt that Jones, as the sheikh's guest, had been dishonoured.
Jones and a colleague also travelled to Beirut and Damascas while on leave and, at the end of his service, he stayed for a short time in an Israeli kibbutz. His experiences became the basis of his first television play, The Widows of Jaffa (1957).
1949–1952: Oxford and "The Song of the Banana Man" Jones went on to attend Wadham College, Oxford, graduating in 1952 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Language and Literature. According to Ian Thomson, in order to reach England Jones and a friend stowed away on a banana boat bound for London. From there, he took a taxi to Oxford paid for with money won playing poker during his voyage. Jones stated that he initially "hated" and "loathed" Oxford because of the arrogance of his publicly educated peers. However, by his second year, he had become a member of a clique of Rhodes scholars and international students, two of whom were Jamaican: the future editor of The Gleaner, Hector Wynter, and Neville Dawes, who would go on to direct the Institute of Jamaica. Other members included the American mathematician Robert W. Bass and the producer Christopher Ralling, who later collaborated with Jones on The Fight Against Slavery (1975).
It was in conversation with Dawes, however, that Jones declared his intention to synthesise English and Jamaican literary traditions; the result was the seminal poem "The Song of the Banana Man", which sets Patois to English metrical verse. Written in 1952, broadcast on the BBC World Service's programme Caribbean Voices in 1953, and published in the Barbadian literary magazine Bim in 1954, the poem is frequently cited by other writers, including Lorna Goodison, former poet laureate of Jamaica, and Raymond Antrobus, whose Jamaican father had the poem on his bedroom wall. The dub poets of the 1970s, namely Linton Kwesi Johnson, Mutabaruka and Mikey Smith, also recognise the poem as a significant influence.
Career
1952–1959: early career with the BBC
After leaving Oxford, Evan Jones was engaged to work at the Campbell Soup Company by friends in the US. Upon arriving in Philadelphia, however, he found that a policy decision which had impelled the company to hire non-white persons had been reversed and that his offer of a job had been rescinded. He then worked as the furnace man at a bubble gum factory before teaching at Quaker schools such as The Putney School, Vermont, and the George School in Pennsylvania. He also taught at Wesleyan University, Connecticut.
During this period, Jones wrote a stage adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's 1947 novel Bend Sinister. Nabokov read and praised the dramatisation in 1955, shortly before the publication of Lolita, calling Jones "a gifted young playwright" in a letter to Edmund Wilson in which he asked Wilson to recommend people to whom he could forward the manuscript. Despite this, the adaptation ultimately went unproduced.
In 1956, Jones married his first wife, the American actress Honora Fergusson, in J. Robert Oppenheimer's garden. Jones had been a protégé of her father, the literary critic and Dante scholar Francis Fergusson, who was a close friend of Oppenheimer's. Once married, Jones moved back to England with his wife, intending to begin his literary career in earnest. Jones's father-in-law gave him introductions to T. S. Eliot, Stephen Spender and Stuart Burge. Within six months of arriving in London, Burge produced Jones's television play The Widows of Jaffa which aired live on 13 June 1957. The play starred Peter Wyngarde, Leo McKern and Harold Kasket; The Sunday Times praised it as "written with fire and insight".
Jones then wrote the television play In a Backward Country, which the BBC produced in 1959, and which also aired live. It was based directly on his family and adapted the Biblical story of David and his son Absalom, starring Dan Jackson, Pearl Prescod, and Wilfred Lawson. Jones's play follows a wealthy Jamaican landowner, resembling his father, and his politician son whom Jones likened to his brother Kenneth. The play is a political parable about the contemporary issue of land reform. After Jamaica was granted her independence from the British Empire in 1962, the call for land reform was a major factor in the incitement of the Jamaican political conflict. The evocation of his brother in Jones's play proved to be ill-omened, as Kenneth would go on to become Minister of Communications and Works in Jamaica's first independent Cabinet but died under suspicious circumstances at a retreat in 1964, many suspecting him to have been murdered.
1960–1967: collaboration with Joseph Losey