Early Years
Jack Jones was born in 1884 at Tai-Harri-Blawdd in Merthyr Tydfil, the son of a coal miner. He joined his father to work in the mine aged 12. At the age of 17 he joined the army and was posted to South Africa with his regiment the Militia Battalion of the Welch. However he was very unhappy there and ended up deserting. Once recaptured, he was transferred to India. When he eventually returned to Wales he went back to working in the coal mines. He married Laura Grimes Evans in 1908. In 1914 Jack Jones was summoned back to his regiment and sent to the front lines in France and later on Belgium. After suffering shrapnel wounds he was invalided home and appointed as recruiting officer for Merthyr Tydfil.
After World War I, Jack Jones became a member of the Communist Party and he attended a convention in Manchester with the purpose of establishing a British Communist Party on behalf of his local lodge. At this meeting he was chosen to be Corresponding Secretary for the South Wales Region. Jack Jones later founded a branch of the Communist Party at Merthyr Tydfil. In 1923 he was appointed as the full-time secretary-representative of the miners at Blaengarw, a position he held until his resignation in 1927.
Read more about this topic: Jack Jones (novelist)
Famous quotes containing the words early years, early and/or years:
“If there is a price to pay for the privilege of spending the early years of child rearing in the driver’s seat, it is our reluctance, our inability, to tolerate being demoted to the backseat. Spurred by our success in programming our children during the preschool years, we may find it difficult to forgo in later states the level of control that once afforded us so much satisfaction.”
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“Early education can only promise to help make the third and fourth and fifth years of life good ones. It cannot insure without fail that any tomorrow will be successful. Nothing “fixes” a child for life, no matter what happens next. But exciting, pleasing early experiences are seldom sloughed off. They go with the child, on into first grade, on into the child’s long life ahead.”
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“War and culture, those are the two poles of Europe, her heaven and hell, her glory and shame, and they cannot be separated from one another. When one comes to an end, the other will end also and one cannot end without the other. The fact that no war has broken out in Europe for fifty years is connected in some mysterious way with the fact that for fifty years no new Picasso has appeared either.”
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