Bring this Barry boy back home

Gareth Jones risked his reputation and his life in pursuit of the story

TO DESCRIBE the time in which Gareth Jones first posted his damning reports of a still-young Soviet Union requires imagining a world without the Gulag, without show trials, repression and four o’clock knocks. Before Stalin was – well, Stalin.

Of course, all of this existed during Jones’ time, but the West knew nothing of it. While the world’s most lauded journalists were happy to be taken around to model collective farms so that they could sing further the praises of an assumed socialist utopia, this Barry boy was trekking from village to village through Soviet Ukraine, through areas forbidden to Western journalists, documenting the Holodomor, a state-created famine that is estimated to have killed between five and 10 million people.

His account of his travels from that time remain harrowing:

In the train 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 two hundred 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.

His first Ukrainian dispatches were published in the Western Mail, but by the time he wrote the above, his work was being read across the globe, from the Manchester Guardian (which has since dropped the northern city from its title) to the New York Evening Post. It created an extraordinary, and quite often hostile, response. Naturally, the Soviet authorities banned him from ever stepping foot on their soil ever again.

But perhaps the most unexpected reaction came from Walter Duranty. The Moscow bureau chief of the New York Times had won journalism’s highest honour, the Pulitzer Prize, a year earlier for his series of stories on life in the Soviet Union. But his deferential reports were being challenged, albeit unwittingly, by the work of a Welsh upstart.

Duranty would not let it lie. In an editorial entitled ‘Russians hungry, but not starving’, the veteran reporter accused Jones of “hasty judgement” based on “inadequate” evidence and his interviewees of creating a “big scare story”. Arguing that “Russian and foreign observers in country could see no grounds for predications of disaster”, Duranty concluded: ”There is no famine or actual starvation, nor is there likely to be”.

Jones proved he was equal to rebutting claims, writing in Duranty’s own paper:

My first evidence was gathered from foreign observers. Since Mr Duranty introduces consuls into the discussion, a thing I am loath to do, for they are official representatives of their countries and should not be quoted, may I say that I discussed the Russian situation with between twenty and thirty consuls and diplomatic representatives of various nations and that their evidence supported my point of view. But they are not allowed to express their views in the press, and therefore remain silent.

Journalists, on the other hand, are allowed to write, but the censorship has turned them into masters of euphemism and understatement. Hence they give “famine” the polite name of ‘food shortage’ and ‘starving to death’ is softened down to read as ‘widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition‘. Consuls are not so reticent in private conversation.

Front page news: Gareth Jones breaks another story on the Holodomor, the Ukrainian famine

Despite this almighty slapdown, Jones’ reports were to have greater ramifications for him than for Duranty*. While from here he appears almost heroic for choosing to take his life and writing reputation in his hands, Jones was discredited for his famine articles at the time. Reduced to working back on the Western Mail covering “arts, crafts and coracles”, as his great-nephew Nigel Linsan Colley put it, it wasn’t long before Jones landed an interview with a local castle owner. The resident of St Donat’s Castle, near Llantwit Major, was William Randoph Hearst, one of the biggest – and certainly one of the most charismatic – newspaper magnates in the world at the time, and the inspiration behind Citizen Kane.

Hearst was impressed by Jones, and invited him to the US to write a further three pieces about Ukraine, where Jones used the term “manmade famine” for the first time. However, once again, his work was damned and discredited. Instead, Jones left in late 1934 for a “Round-the-World Fact-Finding Tour”. He spent about six weeks in Japan, securing a series of interviews with high ranking generals and politicians before moving on to China.

From here, he travelled to Inner Mongolia, then newly occupied by Japan and renamed Manchukuo. He was with a German journalist when they were stopped by Japanese troops and advised to take a certain route back to Kalgan, in China, which they took. However, along the way, they were taken hostage by Chinese bandits who demanded a ransom of 100,000 Mexican silver pesos.

It was at this point that the story grows strange. The German journalist was released after two days, but 16 days later, the day before his 30th birthday, Jones was murdered. His family have always believed that he was shot with the connivance of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police forerunner of the KGB. As Colley puts it: “There is no direct proof, but plenty of indirect proof.”

There is more than just a tenuous correlation between the life of Gareth Jones and his fictional namesake Indiana. He once shared a flight on a 16-seat aircraft with the new German chancellor, Adolph Hitler, and Joseph Goebbels, on their way to a rally in Frankfurt. Jones wrote in the Western Mail, rather presciently: “If this plane should crash the whole history of the Western world will change forever.”

On another occasion, Jones managed to get himself in the photograph when US president Herbert Hoover was having his picture taken with school children outside the gates of the White House. He had also, as a 25-year-old, worked as a foreign affairs adviser to David Lloyd George.

A devout, non-comformist teetotaller, Jones was inspired to travel to Ukraine after hearing stories at his mother’s knee of her time working as a tutor to the family of Arthur Hughes. His father, John Hughes, was a steel industrialist who founded the town of Hughesovska, now known as Donetz.

Although often vilified in life, Jones has been honoured in recent times. A plaque to him was unveiled at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth (from where he had graduated with a first class degree in French in the mid-1920s) in 2006. The ceremony was conducted by Ukrainian Ambassador Ihor Kharchanko. Two years later, that country awarded him its Order of Merit. The country regards the famine as genocide and refers to Jones as a hero of Ukraine.

But perhaps the most significant latter-day development in the story of Jones’ life life began when his 94-year-old sister Gwyneth’s home was burgled in 1990, and his diaries were rediscovered. Last November, they went on display at the Wren Library in Cambridge, where Jones gained another first class honours, in French, German and Russian, at Trinity College in 1929.

His records now sit along items from other famous Trinity old boys such as Isaac Newton, Ludwig Wittgenstein and AA Milne. But now it’s time to bring Gareth Jones’ work back to Wales. Last month, I wrote to Welsh heritage minister Alun Ffred Jones, to inquire whether the diaries could be loaned from Trinity to be put on display in Jones’ home town of Barry. The Minister replied: 

“Any loan from Trinity College would be dependent on Barry Library being able to provide conditions for the display of archival material which met recommended professional standards, particularly in terms of security and environmental control.

“My officials in CyMal: Museums Archives and Libraries Wales division have been in contact with the staff of the Vale of Glamorgan library service to discuss the matter. The library staff are aware that there is local interest in Gareth Jones and that an exhibition may be popular. However, they are concerned over their ability to meet the exacting professional standards required for the exhibition of archival material.

“In the light of these concerns, they are proposing to explore the possibility of working in collaboration with Glamorgan Archives, which does have the facilities and expertise to undertake small exhibitions in their new premises in Leckwith, Cardiff, to address the matter.”

Let us hope we can make this happen. Jones was one of, if not the pre-eminent journalist of his day, breaking a story of such international importance that its ramifications are still being felt today in the country where it happened.

In doing so, Gareth Jones taught the rest of the world a vital lesson in the important role journalism can play as a bulwark against the power of the state and, ultimately, tyranny. As such, he remains one of our great, mostly unsung sons.

* Criticism of Duranty’s reporting on the famine led to a posthumous attempt to strip him of his Pulitzer award. In 2003, after the Pulitzer Board began a renewed inquiry, Duranty’s old paper, the New York Times hired Mark von Hagen, a professor of Russian history at Columbia University, to review Duranty’s work. Von Hagen found Duranty had been unbalanced and uncritical, and had far too often gave voice to Stalinist propaganda. He recommended taking away Duranty’s Pulitzer.

Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr called Duranty’s work “slovenly” and said it “should have been recognized for what it was by his editors and by his Pulitzer judges seven decades ago”. However, the Pulitzer board refused to rescind the award, arguing “there was not clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception, the relevant standard in this case”.