Evan Jones (writer)

Evan Jones
Born	Evan Gordon Newton Jones (1927-12-29)29 December 1927 Portland, Colony of Jamaica, British Empire
Died	18 April 2023(2023-04-18) (aged 95) England
Occupation	Playwright, screenwriter, poet
Language	English
Education	Munro College, Jamaica; Haverford College, Pennsylvania, US
Alma mater	Wadham College, Oxford
Genre	Television drama, screenplays, poetry
Notable works	King and Country Modesty Blaise Funeral in Berlin Wake in Fright Escape to Victory "The Song of the Banana Man"
Notable awards	Martin Luther King Memorial Prize (1976)
Spouse	Honora Furgusson ​ ​ (m. 1956; div. 1963)​ Joanna Jones ​ (m. 1975)​
Children	Melissa, Sadie

Evan Gordon Newton Jones (29 December 1927 – 18 April 2023) was a Jamaican writer based in the United Kingdom. He was educated in Jamaica, the United States and England. Jones remains the most accomplished Jamaican international screenwriter to date. His poetry, especially 'The Song of the Banana Man', is widely anthologised and his output as a playwright for theatre and television spans four decades. He is also the writer of two novels, a biography and collections of Jamaican folk stories.

Early life, family and education

Evan Jones was born on 29 December 1927 in Portland, Jamaica. His father, the Hon. Frederick McDonald Jones OBE JP, was a wealthy planter and Custos of Portland from 1965 until his death in 1971. His mother was Gladys (née Smith) Jones MBE JP was a Quaker Missionary and teacher. He was one of seven children and younger brother to the Hon. Kenneth Jones JP.

Jones was named after his great-grandfather, the Rev. Evan Newton Jones, a Welsh clergyman who came to Jamaica in 1842, building Saint Thomas Anglican Church in Manchioneal. His parents were likewise greatly involved in their community: the Jones family's land covered 10,000 acres, employing a large number of local people from villages such as Duckenfield. His mother also ran Happy Grove Secondary School in Hector's River as both Secretary of the Board of Governors and, at another time, its Acting Principal. Jones's parents instilled in him an early love for poetry and theatre, his father would recite poetry as he made the rounds of their estates. His mother wrote and delivered sermons to her congregation; she also directed pageants, which his father often acted in.

Jones's grew up with his parents being public figures of great significance in the Parish of Portland. In an interview with Dr Laura Tanna OD, Jones said:

'I think because my parents were both very interesting and powerful [...] they had a strong sense of purpose. [...] We were all brought up to believe we had to be somebody and do something, in a very small way like the Kennedy family in the States. [...] It was your job as a human being, because you were born into the manor, to do something with it. [...] I chose to be a writer'.

Jones was raised in rural eastern Jamaica and was educated as a child by a governess. At the time, he owned a dog named Captain Blood. From the age of nine, Jones was educated at the prestigious boarding school Munro College, and at 17 subsequently attended Haverford College, Pennsylvania, majoring in English and Spanish. There he found both academic and athletic success, earning the nickname 'the educated toe' and began to write plays, the first of which was Inherit this Land (first performed in Jamaica, 1951).

After graduating from Haverford in 1949, he went to the Gaza Strip in Palestine with the American Friends Service Committee, which organised the refugee camps there under the auspices of the United Nations. His experiences became the basis of his first television screenplay, The Widows of Jaffa (1957). Jones had previously provided similar relief work for the Committee in Mexico and was therefore tasked with overseeing a refugee camp of 30,000 people at Khan Yunis.

Jones went on to attend Wadham College, Oxford, graduating in 1952 with a BA (Hons.) in English Language and Literature. In order to reach England, he and a friend stowed on a banana boat bound for London; from there, he took a taxi to Oxford paid for with money won playing poker during his voyage. At Oxford, Jones was a member of a clique of Rhodes scholars and international students, two of whom were Jamaican: the future editor of The Gleaner, Hector Wynter, and Neville Dawes, a fellow writer. Other members included the American mathematician Robert W. Bass and the producer Christopher Ralling, who latter collaborated with Jones on The Fight Against Slavery (1975). It was in conversation with Dawes, however, that Jones declared his intention to synthesise English and Jamaican literary traditions; the result was his seminal poem 'The Song of the Banana Man' which sets patois to English metrical verse. The poem was broadcast on BBC World Service's Caribbean Voices programme in 1952 and is frequently cited by other writers, including former poet laureate of Jamaica, Lorna Goodison, and Raymond Antrobus, who as a child had the poem on his bedroom wall, put there by his Jamaican father. The Dub poets of the 1970s, namely Linton Kwesi Johnson, Mutabaruka and Mikey Smith, also recognise the poem as a significant influence."The Song of the Banana Man" is taught in schools throughout the Caribbean and published in anthologies worldwide.

Early television career

1952–9:

After leaving Oxford, Jones was engaged to work at the Campbell Soup Company by friends in the US. Upon arriving in Philidelphia, he found that a policy decision that had impelled the company to hire non-white persons has been reversed and that his offer of a job has been rescinded. He then worked at a bubble-gum factory before teaching at Quaker schools such as The Putney School in Vermont, George School in Pennsylvania and Wesleyan University, Connecticut.

In 1956, Jones married his first wife, the American actress Honora Fergusson, in J. Robert Oppenheimer's garden. Jones had been a student of her father, the literary critic and Dante scholar Francis Fergusson, who was a close friend of Oppenheimer's. Once married, Jones moved back to England with his wife, intending to begin his literary career in earnest. Jones's father-in-law gave him introductions to T. S. Eliot, Stephen Spender and Stuart Burge. Within six months of arriving to London, Burge produced his play The Widows of Jaffa for the BBC in 1956–7, which was met with great success and launched Jones's career. He then wrote In a Backward Country, which the BBC produced in 1959, a play based directly on his family and adapting the Biblical story of David and his son Absalom. Jones's play followed a wealthy Jamaican landowner, resembling his father, and his politician son whom Jones likened to his brother Kenneth. The play is a political parable about the contemporary issue of land reform. After Jamaica gained her independence from the British Empire in 1962, the call for land reform was a major factor in the incitement of the Jamaican political conflict. The evocation of his brother in Jones's play would prove to be ill-omened as Kenneth would go on to become Minister of Communications and Works in Jamaica's first independent Cabinet but died under suspicious circumstances at a retreat in 1964, many suspecting him to have been murdered.

Major phase; film career with Losey, Kotcheff and in Hollywood; The Fight Against Slavery

1960–7:

Jones returned to Jamaica after the production of In a Backward Country to run the family's estates during a period of six months between 1959–60, taking up the duties of his brother Keith, Kenneth's twin brother. He found it difficult to work as a writer during this time and subsequently moved to New York City with his wife, writing a third play for the BBC before returning to London for its production. Upon arrival, he discovered it had been cancelled. Through the American pianist Julius Katchen, a close friend of Jones's whom he had met at Haverford, he met Joseph Losey, who had been subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Comittee (HUAC) while in Europe and chosen to ignore the summons, settling in England. Losey had seen In a Backward Country on television and mentioned to Katchen that he wanted to meet the writer. After being introduced, Losey commissioned Jones to rewrite The Damned (released 1962) for him. Jones moved in with him and delivered the redrafted script in two weeks. It was a body horror film about people who had been irradiated and was a political statement against nuclear war, adapting H. L. Lawrence's novel Children of Light (1960).

Losey and Jones next worked on Eva (released before The Damned, also in 1962), a project initially offered to Jean-Luc Godard.^[17] The screenplay was an adaptation of James Hadley Chase's novel Eve (1945) and took additional inspiration from Raymond Chandler. Hugo D. Butler, another blacklisted person, also wrote for the film. Eve was described by Losey as a "baroque" film: a Romance set in Venice starring Jeanne Moreau. It was intended to have a runtime of around 165 minutes. Jones regarded Moreau as 'the finest actress' he worked with in his career but shared Losey's disappointment with the final film which had been massively cut in the edit on the insistence of the studio.

In 1962, Jones and his wife divorced by mutual consent and he returned to London alone to write 'Lament of the Banana Man'. The poem is a companion piece to 'The Song of the Banana Man', despairing of the experience of the Windrush generation and depicting the once proud speaker of his earlier poem as an alienated London Underground worker, unfulfilled in his relationship. "The Lament of the Banana Man" seemingly brought Jones back to his preoccupation with the sociopolitical dynamics of his home country. In 1962 he wrote The Spectators, which ran for a week at the Guildford Theatre in Surrey. The play was a serious treatment of the relationship between tourists and Jamaicans, a dichotomy which was the premise of his earlier poem "The Song of the Banana Man". He also wrote the television play Return to Look Behind for ITV, who produced it in 1963–4, about the troubled return of a Jamaican immigrant who had spent much time in England.

In this same period, Jones wrote The Madhouse on Castle Street for the BBC, who produced it in 1963: a now lost television play featuring the acting début of Bob Dylan. The play was about a boarding house and the director, Philip Saville, hired Dylan to play the lead. Dylan found acting to be difficult, however; so Jones rewrote his script to accommodate Dylan as a musician, playing the part of the chorus. After filming, Dylan consulted Jones and Saville for their opinions on his then unreleased single 'Blowin' in the Wind' (1963), which he performed for them at Saville's home.

In 1963, Jones also met his second wife, the English actress Joanna Vogel (née Napper), when they met eyes at a party; Jones almost came to blows with another man over which of them would drive her home, Jones prevailing. The two would later be married in Jamaica in the mid-1970s, Joanna Jones would then retire from acting. They had two children, Melissa (b. 1965) and Sadie (b. 1967).

Jones collaborated twice more with Losey, both films starring Dirk Bogarde. Their third film was King and Country (1964), a First World War anti-war drama about the military trial of a deserter. It was very well received, earning nominations for four BAFTAs and two categories at the Venice Film Festival, winning the Volpi Cup. (In 2023, the film was also nominated for the Festival's Best Restored Film.)

Shortly after, in 1965, Jones wrote an unproduced stage adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's 1947 novel Bend Sinister.

Jones and Losey's fourth and final project together was Modesty Blaise (1966), a spy comedy based on Peter O'Donnell and Jim Holdaway's eponymous comic strip. Jones wrote the screenplay to be a Surrealistic parody of the James Bond films, attracting the attention of Harry Saltzman and Albert R. Broccoli. The production was fraught with Jones rewriting large portions of the script during shooting; and, although he was uncredited, Harold Pinter, another of Losey's friends and frequent collaborators, made additional contributions to the script, likely due to Jones and Losey having different ideas on the project.^[24] Jones expressed his unhappiness with the final film, stating that he thought it was 'dreadful' and 'embarrassing'.

After the production of Modesty Blaise had ended, Saltzman and Broccoli offered Jones the task of adapting Len Deighton's 1963 espionage novel Funeral in Berlin. It was the second in a series of films where Michael Caine would play the spy Harry Palmer. The director, Guy Hamilton, planned the film meticulously, an approach that was in direct opposition to Losey's, who preferred to 'make the film up as he went along' and to keep his writers—such as Jones, Pinter and Tennessee Williams—on hand while filming as he felt they 'contributed genius'. This was Jones's first experience writing for a more impersonal big-budget production and he was surprised to find that his role ended once filming started.

In 1967, Jones wrote the play Go Tell it on Table Mountain for the BBC's Thirty-Minute Theatre series (1965–73). The play would go on to be performed in 1970 at both The Little Theatre in Kingston and at the Richmond Fringe Festival in England. It took Rhodesia as its setting, on the verge of the state's 1965 Unilateral Declaration of Independence, and follows a group of black actors in their attempt to improvise a melodrama based on the ongoing racial turmoil. The situation is complicated by the arrival of a white actor, blurring the lines between reality and fiction.

1969–81:

Jones's next great partnership was with the Canadian director Ted Kotcheff, with whom Jones made two controversial and critically acclaimed cult classics. In 1969 Jones wrote Two Gentlemen Sharing, adapting David Stuart Leslie's 1963 novel of the same name, writing about a black Caribbean diaspora man and a white Englishman belonging to an in ruinate gentry family. Both were educated at Oxford and are fascinated with the other's background. The film explores fetishisation, homosexuality and racial politics, receiving an X certificate due to the censors fearing it would incite race riots. The film however performed well in the US and Europe, and was lauded at the Venice Film Festival, where it was chosen as the official British entry. The British Film Institute (BFI) have since rehabilitated and re-released the film, regarding it as a lost classic and giving it an honourable mention among their selection of the '10 Great British Gay Films'.

The two would then collaborate on Wake in Fright, adapting Kenneth Cook's 1961 novel of the same name. The film follows John Grant, an English schoolteacher who loses his money at two-up and becomes beholden to the residents of the outback town of Bundanyabba. It is a disturbing psychological thriller that features shocking uncensored footage of a real Kangaroo hunt. Wake in Fright would come to be regarded as the first important work of the Australian New Wave and is generally considered the movement's finest film. The film premiered at Cannes Film Festival in 1971 and was nominated for the Palme d'Or. Until 2009, the film was thought to be lost but miraculously a negative in good condition was found in Pittsburgh and painstakingly remastered. It was re-released the same year at Cannes Film Festival where it was again met with universal acclaimed. It was selected as a Cannes Classic by Martin Scorsese, who championed the film, and it remains one of only two films to have ever been presented at the Festival twice.

In 1973, Jones was asked to rewrite Brian G. Hutton's horror film Night Watch to make the lead actress Elizabeth Taylor's part more to her liking. Jones obliged, finding Taylor's eccentricities amusing. He explained in an interview that he had written Taylor's character as murdering someone and fleeing the country. Taylor then ordered from her designer a costume to wear while murdering and another to wear while fleeing, requesting Jones rewrite the scene again to give her time to change.

Jones was then approached by an old friend from Oxford, the producer Christopher Ralling, to write an episode of a documentary drama about the transatlantic slave trade for the BBC. He agreed, on the condition that he was given creative control of the entire limited series—Ralling accepted. The project would be called The Fight Against Slavery and take two years to produce, it took Jones a year to research, with the aid of an assistant, and Ralling another year to film, being released in 1975. Jones considered it his magnum opus, introducing each episode in person. The series was awarded the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize in 1976.

He then wrote The Man with the Power for the BBC's Playhouse in 1977, a television play about a black immigrant labourer, Boysie Fuller, who experiences an awakening of latent psychic powers; and, in 1981, the first episode of The Racing Game, a horse racing crime series adapted from Dick Francis's novels. Between 1979–80, he also wrote Kangeroo, released in 1987, adapting D. H. Lawrence's eponymous novel from 1923.

Jones's next film was his only foray into Hollywood, a part of the industry he had chosen to avoid so as to live and work in London. Jones wrote the script for John Huston's Escape to Victory (1981), starring Caine, Max von Sydow, Sylvester Stallone and the Brazilian footballer Pelé. The film was a sports drama set in a prisoner of war camp during the Second World War.

Later literary career

1984–2006:

In the mid-1980s, feeling that he was missing out on the writing of prose, Jones began work on his semi-autobiographical novel, Stone Haven (released in 1993). The novel revolves around the Newtons, a fictionalised version of his own family. In the words of Hector Wynter, Jones's friend from Oxford:

'the novel which recounts the story of an affluent Portland family "contributes the novelesque and the historian with strong and beautiful descriptions of Hector's River and Manchioneal. Evan uses history constructively, and gives us an excellent insight into rural life, particularly in Portland, and the mixture of races"'.

The novel was examined as part of Kim Robinson-Walcott's study Out of Order!: Anthony Winkler and White West Indian Writing (2006), although Jones dismissed her approaches as being myopically focused on race, ignoring the human condition as a whole.

Jones's second novel, Alonso and the Drug Baron (2006), is a crime novel influenced by blaxploitation and the Afro-Caribbean folk mythology figure of Anansi. The story centres around the titular character's struggle to exonerate himself after he is framed for murder by a corrupt police detective.

Personal life and death

Although Jamaican, Jones was a member of the Australian Writers' Guild.

Jones was a keen equestrian, owning horses called Baccari, Quantro and Special Branch. He also owned shares in race horses. He also belonged to the Stage Golfing Society where he would often play against his friend Sean Connery. Other friends of Jones's included the Irish screenwriter Brian Phelan and the English producer Michael Whitehall. He was a collector the work of Elisabeth Frink.

In the 2010s, the University of Oxford's Bodleian Library acquired a collection of documents from Jones's life, including drafts of scripts. In 2024–5, drafts of his poem 'The Song of the Banana Man' were displayed by the institution as part of their Write Cut Rewrite exhibition curated by Prof Dirk Van Hulle and Prof Mark Nixon.

Evan Jones died on 18 April 2023, at the age of 95. He is survived by his second wife, Joanna; and their daughters, Melissa and Sadie, who are both novelists. He has four grandchildren, Tabitha and Fred by Sadie and the Hon. Timothy Boyd; and Edward and Thomas by Melissa and Prof Neil Spiller.

On 12 October 2025, Jones is scheduled to be posthumously inducted into the Munro College Old Boys' Association Hall of Fame.

Works

Theatre

• Inherit this Land (Little Theatre Movement of Jamaica, 1951)
• Bend Sinister (unproduced, 1956)
• In a Backward Country (Guildford Theatre Company, 1962)
• Go Tell it on Table Mountain (Jamaican Theatre Company, Richmond Fringe Festival, 1970)
• The Spectators (Guyana, 1972)

Television

• The Widows of Jaffa (BBC, 1957)
• In a Backward Country, Television Playwright (BBC, 1958)
• Return to Look Behind, Jezebel (ITV, 1963)
• Madhouse on Castle Street, Sunday-Night Play (BBC, 1963)
• Old Man's Fancy, Armchair Theatre (ABC, 1965)
• Go Tell It on Table Mountain, Thirty-Minute Theatre (BBC, 1967)
• A Work of Genius, Away from it All (1973)
• The Fight Against Slavery, miniseries (BBC, 1975)
• The Mind Beyond: The Man with the Power, BBC2 Playhouse (BBC, 1976)
• Rehearsal, Centre Play (BBC, 1977)
• Gambling Lady, The Dick Francis Thriller: The Racing Game (Yorkshire Television, 1979)
• A Curious Suicide, Chillers (FR3, 1990)

Films

• Eva (1962)
• The Damned (1962)
• King and Country (1964)
• Modesty Blaise (1966)
• Funeral in Berlin (1966)
• Two Gentlemen Sharing (1969)
• Wake in Fright, also known as Outback (1971)
• Ghost in the Noonday Sun (1973)
• Night Watch (1973)
• Escape to Victory, also known as Victory (1981)
• The Killing of Angel Street (1981)
• Champions (1984)
• Kangaroo (1987)
• A Show of Force (1990)
• Shadow of the Wolf (1992)

Books

• Protector of the Indians, Nelson, 1958
• Tales of the Caribbean: Anansi Stories, Ginn, 1984
• Tales of the Caribbean: Witches and Duppies, Ginn, 1984
• Tales of the Caribbean: The Beginning of Things, Ginn, 1984
• Skylarking, Longman, 1993
• Stone Haven, Institute of Jamaica Publications, 1993
• Alonso and the Drug Barron, Macmillan Caribbean, 2006

Poetry

• 'Genesis' (n.d.)
• 'Walking with R.B.' (n.d.)
• 'November, 1956' (n.d.)
• 'The Song of the Banana Man' (1956)
• 'Lament of the Banana Man' (1962)

External links

• Evan Jones at IMDb