Evan Jones

Evan Gordon Newton Jones (29 December 1927 – 18 April 2023) was a Jamaican poet, playwright and screenwriter based in the United Kingdom. He was educated in Jamaica, the United States and England. Jones taught at schools in the United States before moving to England in 1956 and beginning a career as a writer.

Jones wrote the scripts for the feature films King and Country (1964), Modesty Blaise (1966), Funeral in Berlin (1966), Wake in Fright (1971), and several television plays.

Evan Jones was born on 29 December 1927 in Portland, Jamaica, the son of a Fred M. Jones, a farmer, and Gladys, a Quaker missionary and teacher. One of seven children, Jones grew up in rural Jamaica and was educated locally, then at the prestigious boarding school Munro College, and subsequently attended Haverford College in Pennsylvania. After Haverford, he went to the Gaza Strip in Palestine in 1949, with the American Friends Service Committee, which organized 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. He graduated from Wadham College, Oxford, in 1952 with a BA (Bachelor of Arts Honours) degree in English literature. Jones taught at the George School in Pennsylvania and Wesleyan University, Connecticut. In 1956, he moved to England and earned his living as a writer of documentary drama, television plays and feature films.

His works include the television documentary series The Fight Against Slavery and several films directed by Joseph Losey, including Eva (a collaboration with Hugo Butler, 1962), King and Country (1964) and Modesty Blaise (1966). Other screenplays by Jones include Funeral in Berlin (1966), Escape to Victory (1981) and A Show of Force (1990). He is also notable as the author of Madhouse on Castle Street (1963), a now lost BBC television play, which featured the acting début of Bob Dylan.

Jones's poem "The Song of the Banana Man" (1956) is taught in schools throughout the Caribbean and published in anthologies worldwide, as well as being frequently cited by other writers, including Lorna Goodison (notably in the first essay of her collection Redemption Ground, and Raymond Antrobus, who as a child had the poem on his bedroom wall, put there by his Jamaican father.[10] Another well-known poem by Jones, "Lament of the Banana Man", dates from 1962, the year of Jamaica's independence. Jones also wrote biographies, and textbooks and novels for children.[11]

His wife, Joanna Vogel, was an actress and his daughters Melissa and Sadie are both novelists.[12] Evan Jones died on 18 April 2023, at the age of 95.[13][14]

The Bodleian Library holds a collection of documents from Jones' life, including drafts of scripts.[15][16]