Gareth Jones [bas relief by Oleh Lesiuk]
BOOKS
TOPICAL
GENERAL
| PrefaceGareth Jones, my
uncle, was killed in Inner Mongolia on the eve of his 30th birthday in 1935.
The last words he wrote, before he was captured by bandits were: “There
are two roads to Kalgan to where we go back; over one 200 Japanese lorries have
travelled; the other is infested by bad bandits.” A ransom of £8,000
was demanded by the bandits. The story
commences in Japan where he interviewed a number of Japanese politicians of
worldwide influence. He was a journalist on a ‘Fact Finding Tour of the
World’. That he had been David Lloyd George’s Foreign Affairs Adviser
gave him entrée into the presence of these famous men. Leaving Tokyo he
visited a number of Far Eastern countries and in each he made exhaustive
enquiries into local political opinion for it was his ambition to write a book
on the intentions of the Japanese in the Far East. He travelled through
China and his eventual destination was to be Manchukuo, from where he never
returned alive. His death at such a young age, in my opinion, was not an act of local Chinese banditry, but should be seen in the light of the global events of the nineteen-thirties. To quote
Mr R. Barrett of The Critic of Hong Kong in a letter of condolence to Gareth’s
father: There
is no doubt that Gareth was in deep waters, for the swirl of Far Eastern
politics is more ruthless and treacherous than anything conceivable in the West,
more a mixture of petty interests of money and ‘face’ with the enormous
clash of national interests. They knew what he had discovered in Russia
and they knew what he had found out in the East.
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