Gareth Jones

[bas relief by Oleh Lesiuk]

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GENERAL

Preface

Gareth 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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