Mametz Wood no relation World War I
World War I
With the outbreak of the First World War, Jones enlisted in the London Welsh Battalion of the Royal Welch Fusiliers on 2 January 1915 and served on the Western Front in 1915–1918 with the 38th (Welsh) Division. Jones spent more time on the front line (117 weeks) than any other British writer in the war. He was wounded at Mametz Wood, recuperated in the Midlands, was returned to the Ypres Salient, and joined in the attack on Pilckem Ridge at Passchendaele in 1917. He nearly died of trench fever in 1918, but recovered in England and was stationed in Ireland till the Armistice. Jones's wartime experience was the basis for his long poem In Parenthesis.1920s
In 1919 Jones won a government grant to return at Camberwell Art School. From Camberwell, he followed Walter Bayes to the Westminster School of Art in central London, where he studied under him and with Bernard Meninsky, and was influenced by Walter Sickert, an occasional lecturer there, whom he came to know personally. Jones received instruction towards becoming a Catholic from Fr. John O'Connor, who suggested Jones visit Eric Gill and his guild of Catholic craftsmen at Ditchling in Sussex. Influenced by Gill, Jones entered the Catholic Church in 1921, chiefly, he said, because it seemed "real" in contrast to Christian alternatives. He also liked the Church's continuity with Classical antiquity. In 1922 he increasingly spent time at Ditchling, apprenticed as a carpenter but never becoming a full member of Gill's Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic. Having shown himself an incompetent carpenter, Jones turned to wood-engraving, whose rudiments Desmond Chute had taught him. In 1923 Jones worked as an illustrator, for The Game published by Gill and Hilary Pepler. He also engraved original work for Pepler's St. Dominic's Press, including The Rosary Book. When Gill moved to Capel-y-ffin in the Black Mountains of South Wales in 1923, Jones returned to London, but often visited Gill there and also the Benedictines on Caldey Island, near Tenby.
Jones was among the first modern engravers to combine white-line and black-line engraving. In 1927 he joined the Society of Wood Engravers. He illustrated The Book of Jonah, Aesop's Fables. and, for the Golden Cockerel Press, Gulliver's Travels  and engraved a large, elaborate frontispiece for a Welsh translation of the Book of Ecclesiastes, Llyfr y Pregethwr. Subsequently Robert Gibbings commissioned him to illustrate, with eight large wood engravings, The Chester Play of the Deluge (1927), and Douglas Cleverdon commissioned him to illustrate, with eight large copper engravings, Coleridge's poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1929). In 1930 eye-strain forced him to give up engraving.
In 1924 Jones had become engaged to marry Gill's daughter Petra, but in 1927 she broke off the engagement to marry a mutual friend. Distressed, Jones concentrated on art. Petra's long neck and high forehead continued as female features in his artwork. He returned to live with his parents at Brockley, also spending time at a house they rented on the coast at Portslade. He painted prolifically and exhibited watercolour seascapes and Welsh landscapes in London galleries. In 1927 Jones made friends with Jim Ede, at the Tate Gallery, who introduced him to art critics and prospective buyers, including Helen Sutherland, who became a patron. Ede introduced him to the painter Ben Nicholson, who in 1928 had Jones elected to the Seven and Five Society,  whose other members included Barbara Hepworth, Winifred Nicholson, Cedric Morris, Christopher Wood, and Henry Moore. Jones remained a member until 1935, when he was expelled by Nicholson for not painting abstracts. Disappointed by published accounts of personal combat experience during the war, in 1928 he began writing In Parenthesis, a fictional work based on his own experiences in the trenches. He was now in love with Prudence Pelham, who was its muse.
no relation