Gareth Vaughan Jones

“Gareth Jones was a journalist who won every step of his way by personal force; he has perished on one of the horizons he was always questing.”

At dawn on August 13^th 1905, a son was born to Edgar and Annie Gwen Jones in their home, Eryl, Barry and his proud parents gave him the name, Gareth Richard Vaughan Jones. The child blossomed into manhood living his life to the full; a man true to himself. Tragically, his life was cut short on the eve of his 30^th birthday. He was to achieve more in his short life than most men who are fortunate enough to live to a ripe old age.

Barry was a rapidly expanding town in the early days of the century - a booming seaport exporting coal from south Wales, dug by the Welsh miners from the pits owned by their master and the benefactor, David Davies. With the increase of a young population in the town, education became a priority and in 1899 Edgar Jones was appointed headmaster of the recently established Barry County School for both boys and girls. Though a schoolmaster he was known always as the ‘Major’ following his service as Commander of the Glamorgan Fortress during World War One. He was loved and highly esteemed by his pupils and regarded as “The Mathew Arnold” of Wales.

Gareth’s mother was an accomplished and interesting woman in her own right. She had spent three years as tutor to the two daughters of Arthur Hughes from 1889 to 1892 in Hughesovka leaving with the whole family to flee from the town on account of Cholera riots. Arthur Hughes was the son of the Welshman, John Hughes the steel industrialist who founded the town of Hughesovka, later the tragic town of Stalino in World War II and today known as the city of Donetsk. She was a woman of high principles who loved freedom and liberty and reading through her account 'Life on the Steppes of Russia' one can see how she influenced Gareth The stories of her wonderful experiences instilled in him a desire to visit the Soviet Union and Ukraine. With this goal in mind he studied languages and had a brilliant academic career at University. He first attended Aberystwyth College with two years between in Strasburg University. In 1926 he gained an Entrance Exhibition to Trinity College, Cambridge where he gained first-class honours in French and German in Tripos, Part I in 1927, and a Double First, Tripos Part Two in German and Russian in 1929. These languages he spoke so fluently that he could easily pass for a native speaker.

In 1929, employment for Cambridge graduates, even with excellent results, was difficult to obtain, but following an introduction by Dr Thomas Jones in 1930, Gareth was appointed to the position of Foreign Affairs Adviser to the Wartime Prime Minister, David Lloyd George. It was during this summer he made his initial visit to the U.S.S.R. and his ‘pilgrimage’ to Hughesovka. The visit was very brief as the only food he could obtain him was one small roll of bread. His letter home from Berlin wrote of the terrible conditions in Ukraine, of famine and he anticipated many deaths.

Returning from the Soviet Union, on recommendation from Sir Bernard Pares, he was offered employment by Dr. Ivy Lee, public relations adviser to organizations such as the Rockefeller Institute, the Chrysler foundation and Standard Oil. The intention was research a book on the Soviet Union. Soon after his arrival in Wall Street, New York in May, 1931 he was invited to accompany Jack Heinz II to the Soviet Union. Fortified with food from the Heinz organization including tins of Baked Beans they made their visit in the summer of 1931 and at the end of their tour they visited Ukraine. Gareth wrote comprehensive diaries of this visit and from them Jack Heinz was to publish a book anonymously entitled Experiences in Russia 1931: A Diary[1]. Famine conditions were worse - far worse than the year before. Many 'Kulaks' were being uprooted, many dying particularly en route to Siberia.

On account of the severe Depression of 1931/32 in the U.S.A. Gareth was forced, due to financial reasons, to leave ‘Ivy Lee and Associates’ in Wall Street, and he returned to work for David Lloyd George. Unbeknown to many he assisted the former Prime Minister in writing his War Memoirs.

In the autumn of 1932 there were rumours in London of the terrible famine occurring under Stalin’s regime in the Soviet Union and particularly Ukraine and Gareth made further plans to visit the country. His close friend, Paul Scheffer's, considered one of the greatest correspondents of the 20th century, “calamitous predictions about Russia are now coming true”. But dramatic events were occurring in Germany and so in late January and early February 1933 he visited the ‘Vaterland’ firstly, a country he knew extremely well. He had visited Germany each year from 1922 – a date when the Deutsch Mark was so low in value that it is said he made the whole journey for £5. He was present in Leipzig the day Adolf Hitler was made Chancellor and a few days later flew with the dictator in his famous plane ‘Richthofen’ to Frankfurt. There, Gareth was present at a great rally where the newly appointed Fuehrer was given a tumultuous reception and where the hall echoed to the ovation made by the newly appointed Chancellor of Germany. The article that he wrote about his flight with Hitler is a classic piece of writing.[2]

It was in the next month, March 1933 that he made his third and final visit to the U.S.S.R. and to Ukraine to investigate the reports that had filtered through of the terrible starvation to the city. In his diary, on Gareth’s arrival in Moscow, he records that he met Malcolm Muggeridge and they discussed the famine in Ukraine. Soon after this, Muggeridge’s articles were published in the Manchester Guardian[3] on March 25^th, 26^th and 27^th respectively though according to Muggeridge these had been drastically edited by the left wing newspaper.

Careful about what he wrote in his letters home from the Soviet Union, on his return to Berlin, Gareth Jones immediately gave his famous press release on the 29^th of March 1933 and this was printed in many American and British newspapers including the New York Evening Post[4] and the Manchester Guardian:

I walked along through villages and twelve collective farms. Everywhere was the cry, ‘There is no bread. We are dying. This cry came from every part of Russia, from the Volga, Siberia, White Russia, the North Caucasus, and Central Asia. I tramped through the black earth region because that was once the richest farmland in Russia and because the correspondents have been forbidden to go there to see for themselves what is happening.

In the train [en route to Ukraine] a Communist denied to me that there was a famine. I flung a crust of bread which I had been eating from my own supply into a spittoon. A peasant fellow-passenger fished it out and ravenously ate it. I threw an orange peel into the spittoon and the peasant again grabbed it and devoured it. The Communist subsided. I stayed overnight in a village where there used to be 200 oxen and where there now are six. The peasants were eating the cattle fodder and had only a month’s supply left. They told me that many had already died of hunger. Two soldiers came to arrest a thief. They warned me against travel by night, as there were too many ‘starving’ desperate men.

“‘We are waiting for death’ was my welcome, but see, we still, have our cattle fodder. Go farther south. There they have nothing. Many houses are empty of people already dead,’ they cried.

“A foreign expert returning from Kazakstan told me that 1,000,000 out of 5,000,000 there have died of hunger. I can believe it. After Stalin, the most hated man in Russia is Bernard Shaw among those who read his glowing descriptions of plentiful food in their starving land. The future is blacker than the present. There is insufficient seed. Many peasants are too weak physically to work on the land.”

On the 31st of March, the infamous denial of Jones’ statement was made by Walter Duranty in the New York Times[5] stating there was no famine and these were the headlines to that article RUSSIANS HUNGRY, BUT NOT STARVING. Duranty maintained that: “There is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation, but there is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition. In short, conditions are definitely bad in certain sections - the Ukraine, North Caucasus and Lower Volga. The rest of the country is on short rations but nothing worse. These conditions are bad, but there is no famine.”

He said the Kremlin denied the doom and that Russian and Foreign Observers in the country could see not grounds for the predictions of disaster. He went on to say that:

“Mr. Jones is a man of a keen and active mind, and he has taken the trouble to learn Russian, which he speaks with considerable fluency, but the writer thought Mr. Jones's judgment was somewhat hasty and asked him on what it was based. It appeared that he had made a forty-mile walk through villages in the neighborhood of Kharkiv and had found conditions sad.

“I suggested that that was a rather inadequate cross-section of a big country but nothing could shake his conviction of impending doom.”

On May 13th the New York Times[6] published a reply in a letter which Gareth wrote saying that he stood by every word he said:

“While partially agreeing with my Statement, he [Duranty] implied that my report was a ‘scare story’ and compared it with certain fantastic prophecies of Soviet downfall. He also made the strange suggestion that I was forecasting the doom of the Soviet régime, a forecast I have never ventured.

“I stand by my statement that Soviet Russia is suffering from a severe famine. It would be foolish to draw this conclusion from my tramp through a small part of vast Russia, although I must remind Mr. Duranty that it was my third visit to Russia, that I devoted four years of university life to the study of the Russian language and history and that on this occasion alone I visited in all twenty villages, not only in the Ukraine, but also in the black earth district, and in the Moscow region, and that I slept in peasants’ cottages, and did not immediately leave for the next village.”

On his return to Britain Gareth was to write about 20 in British newspapers, The Daily Express, The Financial News and The Western Mail, but none appeared after April 20^th about the man-made famine in Ukraine. It was as though he had been silenced. In Danzig, two months later he met the German Consul to Kharkiv who praised these articles but said the conditions were far worse than Gareth had described them and that millions were dying in Ukraine. The situation was unbearable. The following year Gareth wrote further articles for Randolph Hearst’s, Los Angeles Examiner[7] and no doubt these were published in Hearst’s other syndicated newspapers.

Many more indignities were piled on Gareth. Not only had he been denigrated by Walter Duranty, but he was accused of lying by the Moscow Correspondents, placed on the Black List of the O.G.P.U. and accused of espionage by the Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Maxim Litvinoff. Litvinoff was a friend of David Lloyd George. Gareth after this appeared to be ostracized by the British establishment and never to be contacted by Lloyd George again. Gareth was banned from the U.S.S.R. This must have been a bitter disappointment to him as he was unable to return to a country about which he knew a great deal, and had spent so much time studying her literature, history and language. For his age he must have been one of the foremost specialists in Britain on the country. The academic world had lost a man who had he lived would have been as renowned as Sir Bernard Pares.

Gareth never survived long enough to be vindicated by Eugene Lyons in his book Assignment in Utopia.[8] Eugene Lyons describes how Gareth Jones’ portrayal of the shocking situation in Soviet Russia and Ukraine was denied. There was a need to remain on friendly terms with the censors, at least for the duration of the trial of the Metrovik British engineers and it was a compelling professional necessity. Persuaded by the head censor in the Bolshevik News Agency, Comrade Umansky, these correspondents were placed in position where they more or less had to condemn Gareth Jones as a liar

In 1933 to 1934 Gareth was employed as a journalist and reporter to the Welsh newspaper, The Western Mail. During his employment with the newspaper he wrote some delightful articles about Wales, a Wales that no longer exists in this day and age of technology. Here, in these articles he shows his genius and ability to describe scenes of his beloved homeland vividly and poetically. He showed compassion and humour. The vitality of his prose is shown in the full light of his exuberance. His depth of pity for the miners and steel workers from the Valleys of south Wales is evident in his articles describing the scourge of unemployment and the deplorable living conditions of the poor.

Gareth made two visits to Ireland during his period in the ‘wilderness’ and wrote on the ‘Enigma of Ireland. – his articles are well worth reading giving an insight into the Irish problem. He interviewed Éamon De Valera who spoke with envy about the way Wales had kept its language. Before leaving Dublin in March 1934, Gareth spoke at the Dublin Rotary Club meeting on 'The Russia of Today'. Gareth, was thanked, described as the most eloquent speaker they had had for sometime, and placed him along side the finest orators known in the 19th century English Parliament naming Parnell, Sexton, Healey and Dillon (Irish Nationalists) to name, but few famous Irish men.

The Far East was an enigma to the west and as so, Gareth wished to find out and investigate the Japanese intentions of expansion in the Far East and in particular northern China and Manchukuo. In 1931 Japan invaded Manchuria, deposing its Governor, the War Lord, Chang Hsueh-Liang, known also as the Young Marshall. It was named Manchukuo in the following year, Not only had Britain a vast empire to rule, but was anxious about events in Germany. She did not wish a confrontational front in Asia as well as Europe.

Gareth resigned from The Western Mail and he left Britain in late October 1934 to embark on a ‘Round the World Fact-Finding Tour’. He arrived in New York in time for the congressional elections resulting in immense support for F.D Roosevelt. Three interesting months were spent in the States. He interviewed Frank Lloyd Wright in his home Taliesin.[9] On New Years Day he visited Randolph Hearst, the anti-Communist newspaper magnet who was duly impressed with the young journalist.

On January 18^th 1935 Gareth left for the Far East calling firstly in Hawaii. There he foresaw the problems involving the Japanese that might erupt in the newly-built Pearl Harbour. While there, one of the articles he wrote, with uncanny intuition, was entitled the ‘Rape of Manchuria’.

He spent six weeks in Japan where he interviewed some of the most important politicians influencing the politics of Japan and the Far East in the early 30’s. Namely Eliji Amô, the Foreign Office Spokesman, Yosuke Matsuoka who took Japan out of the League of Nations, Admiral Mineo Osumi, the Naval Minister, Genera Sadao Araki, the former War Minister who advocated ‘Strike North’ into Siberia and General Senjuro Hayashi, the War Minister who succeeded Araki. The fact that he had been David Lloyd George's former Foreign Affairs Secretary gave him entreé to meeting these men.

Leaving Japan, Gareth spent 3-4 months visiting the countries around, what today is called the Pacific Basin, enquiring about the situation in each country and their attitude to the Japanese. His final intended destination was to be Manchukuo of which his associates in America and Japan were well aware.

Briefly calling in Shanghai and Hong Kong, Gareth landed in the Philippines two days after Roosevelt had given the country Independence. His next port of call was Java where he was introduced to Black Magic, saw Opium production and was shown a map in which Japan had coloured the Dutch East-Indies (Indonesia) and Australia as their colonies. Sailing to Singapore he was shown round the newly constructed Naval Base, ‘The Bulwark of the East’ and then on to Siam (Thailand) by tramp steamer where he remained for two weeks. The highlight of his visit was the interview with Luang Pradit, Pridi Panomyong, the young Marxist who had endeavoured in 1933 to overthrow the Princes in a coup de état.

Gareth left by train to travel overland through Cambodia. He was mesmerised by Ankor Wat and he continued by bus through French Indo-China seeing numerous opium dens on the way, before catching a boat to Hong Kong. In this British Colony, with the aid of Gerald Yorke (a secret agent) he arranged his unaccompanied journey through bandit country to Changsha and on to Nanking.

While on the train to Canton (Guang Dong) he met some lively young people. Their fathers were respectively General Tsai Ting-Kai[10] who was living in exile in Hong Kong following a failed coup known as the Fukien Rebellion and General Chen Chi-Tang, War Lord of Canton who gave safe passage to Mao Tse-Tung[11] in the early part of the Long March and had been buying Tungsten from Mao's mines to sell to the Germans. Both Generals were adversaries of Chang Kai-Shek and opponents of the Japanese. Gareth's journey to Changsha was extremely adventurous. He then proceeded to Nanking where he interviewed, the Young Marshall, Chiang Hsueh-Liang, and finally arrived in Peking. There, he received an invitation from Baron von Plessen of the German Legation and accompanied by Dr Herbert Mueller, they attended the Meeting of the Mongolian Princes. Gareth was the only person to be interviewed by their chief, Prince Teh Wang.

Von Plessen returned to the German Legation and Gareth, the intrepid journalist travelled into Inner Mongolia to a town called Dolonor with the German, Dr Herbert Mueller. They believed it to be in Chinese territory, but found that they had ventured into an area, infiltrated a few days previously, by the Japanese Army and where Kwantung troops were massing - up to 40,000 though the figure varies. Apprehended by the Japanese they were eventually told that there were three (or two according to Gareth) ways back to the Chinese town of Kalgan, one of which was safe the other being infested by bad bandits. Taking the presumed safe route on the following day they were captured by the brigands and held for ransom for 100,000 Mexican dollars (£8,000). The German was released within two days, but after 16 days in captivity, Gareth was murdered. The bandits were disbanded Chinese soldiers. His death still remains a mystery, but it was certainly politically motivated for he was looked upon as an important captive having been employed by David Lloyd George.

The verdict remains open on Gareth’s death. The Japanese almost certainly intended to invade Inner Mongolia. The question remains whether Gareth’s capture by bandits, controlled by the Japanese was a covert plan. Was it a pretext to release an important captive by the Kwangtung Army thereby invading the territory? Initially the vehicle, the pair were in, was owned by the organization, Wostwag a cover for the O.G.P.U.[12] After Dr Mueller, who has been found to be a Soviet Agent, was released, the bandits holding Gareth were changed to another band and a Soviet connection with the banditry seems less likely.[13]

Which of the great powers would have been the most interested in eliminating Gareth? Neither the Soviets nor the Chinese would have wished an invasion of Inner Mongolia. Gareth had endeavoured to expose the Five-Year Plan of Collectivisation and Industrialisation and in its wake he had, by his articles attempted to bring world-wide attention to a desperate situation, the Great Famine in Ukraine; an atrocity, the knowledge of which, Stalin had attempted suppress. For this did Stalin order his death as a vendetta or did the Bolshevist regime kill him fearing the invasion of Inner Mongolia and subsequently incursion into Soviet Siberia?[14] The Soviets feared the presence of the Japanese on the border of Siberia as they had designs on striking north into Soviet Territory. It would not have been in the Japanese interest to kill Gareth in their quest for raw materials and their desire to be a colonial power though in their turn they might have been anxious that Gareth did not expose their carefully laid plans to invade by stealth, the Northern provinces. China, possibly the most devious of these countries was playing a waiting game, powerless to fight the Japanese; did she kill Gareth to foil the latter's strategies? The Chinese would not have wished the loss of their land in the north. Their militia was in hot pursuit after the bandits and it is possible they may have killed him. Gareth's murder might have been quite simply carried out by the bandits fearing capture by the militia.

There are many theories to debate, but until there is documentary evidence as to how Gareth died we shall never know the answer. Did his death foil the invasion of Inner Mongolia in 1935? According to H.T.Barrett of the Hong Kong Critic[15], “It is quite obvious that efforts were made to create another international incident.”

Gareth had revealed to the world the terrible famine in the Soviet Union and Ukraine; he predicted the Second World War in Europe would breakout following the Danzig Corridor dispute between Germany and Poland. Had he lived he might have been able to reveal the designs of territorial expansion by the Japanese that would bring about the conflagration in the Far East. He foresaw problems in Pearl Harbour as early as 1935 and he pointed to the problems in the north of Czechoslovakia. His predictions were uncanny.

Gareth Jones, a great Welsh patriot, walked with princes and had seen the plight of peasants. “He had this gift of international understanding; he had this genius of becoming the interpreter of nations to one another. To him was given, for example, the power, the rare power of an instinctive reaction to an international dispute not as a quarrel, which it seldom or never is, between ‘a right and a wrong’ but between ‘two rights”. He was an idealist – a lover of liberty and a foe of oppression.[16] The truth to him was all-important. His death on the eve of his thirtieth birthday was a tragic loss not only to his family but also to the world and to society as a whole.

[1] The Author, Experiences in Russia -1931: A diary, Alton Press, Pittsburg 1932. (written anonymously by Jack Heinz with a preface by Gareth Jones.)

[2] Gareth Jones, ‘With Hitler Across Germany’. The Western Mail, 28 February, 1933 p.6.

[3] Malcolm Muggeridge, ‘The Soviet and the Peasantry’, The Manchester Guardian, March 25,27,28, 1933 p,p,p, 9,10,10.

[4] H.R Knickerbocker, ‘Famine Grips Russia, Millions Dying, Idle on Increase, Says Briton’, New York Evening Post, March 29, 1933.

[5] Walter Duranty, RUSSIANS HUNGRY, BUT NOT STARVING. New York Times., March 31,1933.

[6] Gareth Jones, ‘Mr Jones Replies’, New York Times, May 13, 1933.

[7] Ibid, ‘Russians Starving’, There is no Bread’, ‘Reds Let Peasants Starve’, Los Angeles Advertiser, January 12,13,14 1935.

[8] Eugene Lyons, Assignment in Utopia, Harcourt Brace, New York, 1937, p.576.

9 Gareth Jones, ‘Frank Wright’. The Western Mail, 8th February 1935.

[10] Margaret Siriol Colley, A Manchukuo Incident, Nigel Colley, Newark, 2001. p 280.

[11] Juan Chang and Jon Holliday, Mao: the Unknown Story, Jonathon Cape, London, 2005.

[12] http://www.garethjones.org/muller/muller.htm

[13] Mr R.T.Barrett, Hong Kong Critic. August 25^th 1935. Pages, 2.

[14] Juan Chang and Jon Holliday, Mao: the Unknown Story, Jonathon Cape, London, 2005.p. 208.

‘Following Japan’s swift occupation of northern China in July [1937] posed a very direct danger to Stalin. Tokyo’s huge armies were now in a position to turn north and attack Russia anywhere along a border many thousands of kilometres long.’

[15] Mr R.T.Barrett, Hong Kong Critic. August 25^th 1935. P.2.

[16] Margaret Siriol Colley, A Manchukuo Incident, Nigel Colley, Newark, 2001. p 267.

Reverend Gwilym Davies’s Tribute to Mr Gareth Jones: “Apostle of International Understanding.”