Gareth Richard
Vaughan Jones
****
1905 -1935
“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.”
J.L. Garvin;
Editor of The Observer
At dawn on
August 13th 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 30th 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.
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.
.
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
on March 25th, 26th and 27th
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
29th of March 1933 and this was printed in many American and
British newspapers including the New York Evening Post
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
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
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 20th 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
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.
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 Wale 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.
On New Years Day he visited Randolph Hearst, the anti-Communist
newspaper magnet who was duly impressed with the young journalist.
On January 18th
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
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
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.
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.
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?
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,
“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.
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.
*******
Further
Reference: Gareth Jones: A Manchukuo Incident
More Than a
Grain of Truth: The Biography of Gareth Richard Vaughan Jones
By Margaret
Siriol Colley
http://www.margaretcolley.co.uk/articles_soviet.htm
http://www.margaretcolley.co.uk/articles-japan.htm
http://www.garethjones.org
9
Gareth Jones, ‘Frank Wright’. The Western Mail, 8th
February 1935.
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.’
Reverend Gwilym Davies’s Tribute to Mr Gareth Jones: “Apostle
of International Understanding.”
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