David Jones - Keith Alldritt

David Jones was born in Brockley South London in 1895. His father, a printer, was a Welshman from Flint in North Wales. In David Jones's life and art his Welsh heritage was of central importance. In 1915 he enlisted in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers and spent the next three years fighting in the trenches on the Western Front. They were prehaps the most significant years of his life and led to the writing of his masterpiece "In Parenthesis" which took him some 20 years to write and was not published until 1937. It was acclaimed by T.S. Eliot as "a masterpiece", and won the Hawthornden Prize. It records graphically the horrors of war but also the sense of human fellowship that developed between many soldiers fighting in the trenches together. In 1922 David Jones made friends with the sculptor Eric Gill, both were recent Catholic converts - and fell in love with Gill's daughter Petra. He continued painting until his death in May 1974, a few months after he had been made a Companion of Honour.