Life
Born to a Welsh-speaking family at Tyn-y-Coed, a small farm near Newborough, Anglesey, at the age of fourteen Jones was apprenticed to a draper in Caernarfon and afterwards moved to Pwllheli, then to Bangor and eventually, when he was nineteen, to London. In 1872 he entered the firm of Dickins, Smith & Stevens in Regent Street. There he was successively promoted to buyer, manager, director, chairman of the board and finally to partner, when the name of the store was changed to Dickins & Jones.
He was also involved in the management of other businesses and was prominent in movements for the promotion of workers' welfare, as well as supporting profit-sharing schemes for his employees. He was Treasurer of the Welsh National Museum and a member of the Council of the North Wales University College at Bangor, of which he was a generous benefactor, becoming Vice-President of the College Council in 1909. The University of Wales awarded him an honorary doctorate.
Jones maintained lifelong links with his native county, where he had a home, Bron Menai, Dwyran. He was made High Sheriff of Anglesey for 1905, and in 1910 a Deputy Lieutenant of Anglesey and a Baronet, for his services to education and the community.
As well as his house in Wales, Jones had a country house at Elstree, in Hertfordshire called Maes yr Hâv.
In 1911 he married secondly Marie, the younger daughter of Charles Read, and with her had two sons. He died at his London home in 1917, the result of an accident. He was succeeded in the baronetcy by his elder son, also called John Prichard-Jones, then aged four.
Read more about this topic: John Prichard-Jones
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“For life is but a dream whose shapes return,
Some frequently, some seldom, some by night
And some by day,”
—James Thomson (1834–1882)
“Life! Life! Don’t let us go to life for our fulfilment or our experience. It is a thing narrowed by circumstances, incoherent in its utterance, and without that fine correspondence of form and spirit which is the only thing that can satisfy the artistic and critical temperament. It makes us pay too high a price for its wares, and we purchase the meanest of its secrets at a cost that is monstrous and infinite.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“Roger Thornhill: Has life been like that?
Eve Kendall: Uhm mm.
Roger Thornhill: How come?
Eve Kendall: Men like you.
Roger Thornhill: What’s wrong with men like me?
Eve Kendall: They don’t believe in marriage.
Roger Thornhill: I’ve been married twice.
Eve Kendall: See what I mean?”
—Ernest Lehman (b.1920)