Ffeil NLW MS 24167i-iiiE. - David Jones letters to Valerie Wynne-Williams

David Jones (1895-1974) was an accomplished artist who produced watercolours, illustrations and inscriptions, and who also gained acclaim as a poet, especially as the author of In Parenthesis in 1937, and the long prose poem The Anathemata in 1952.
David Walter Jones was born in Brockley, Kent, on 1 November 1895. His mother, Alice Ann née Bradshaw, was from London, and his father, James Jones, was originally from Holywell, Flintshire. He attended the Camberwell School of Art from 1910-1914, and the Westminster School of Art from 1919-1921.
He joined the London Welsh Battalion of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers in 1915 and served as a private with them until 1918. This experience had a profound effect on him, and his first book, In Parenthesis (1937), is an epic war poem which deals with the period he spent in France.
In 1921 he was received into the Roman Catholic Church, adopting Michael as a middle name. This was a defining moment in his life and work. In the same year he met Eric Gill and joined Gill's community at Ditchling, Sussex, where he learnt wood-engraving. In 1924 he became engaged to Petra Gill and often visited the family at Capel y ffin, near Abergavenny. His engagement with Petra was broken off in 1927 and subsequently he never married.
Between 1928 and 1932 he moved around a great deal, producing watercolours and also writing. In 1933 he suffered a breakdown in health and endured repeated periods of ill-health from then onwards. He virtually stopped painting until 1937. In 1937 Faber published In Parenthesis, which T. S. Eliot regarded as 'a work of genius'. He was awarded the Hawthornden prize for it in 1938.
He was based at the parental home at Brockley until his mother's death in 1937. He then lived in Notting Hill, and from about 1946 lived in Harrow on the Hill. In 1970 he fell ill after breaking a bone in his hip and resided at Calvary Nursing Home, Harrow until his death in 1974.
A volume of essays Epoch and Artist was published by Faber in 1959, followed by The Fatigue (1965), The Tribune's Visitations (1969) and The Introduction to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1972). The Sleeping Lord (1974) and The Roman Quarry (1981) were published posthumously.
In 1955 he was awarded the CBE, and also the Harriet Monroe memorial prize. In 1960 he was awarded the degree of D. Litt from The University of Wales and became both Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of the Royal Watercolour Society in 1961. He was awarded the Royal National Eisteddfod of Wales Gold medal in 1964 and the Welsh Arts Council Literature Prize in 1969.

Lady Megan Lloyd George (1902-66) was the fifth child of David and Margaret Lloyd George. She enjoyed a quite unique childhood at 11 and 10 Downing Street, and accompanied her father to the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. Widely regarded as her father's natural political heir by the mid-1920s, she was elected Liberal MP for Anglesey in May 1929, the first woman MP in the history of Wales. In 1931 she became one of the tiny band of Lloyd George Liberals, and during the 1930s spoke regularly in the House of Commons on agriculture, unemployment and Welsh affairs. During the second world war she became a keen advocate of women's rights and Welsh issues. She was already clearly moving leftwards in the political spectrum, and there were persistent rumours that she was likely to join the Labour Party. In 1949 Clement Davies appointed Megan deputy leader of the Parliamentary Liberal Party. She was defeated by Cledwyn Hughes in 1951, and subsequently joined the Labour Party in April 1955. She served as president of the Parliament for Wales campaign, 1950-56. Megan was elected Labour MP for Carmarthenshire in February 1957, serving until her death from cancer in May 1966. She remained a backbencher. Although unmarried, Lady Megan Lloyd George had a long, passionate affair with the Labour MP Philip Noel-Baker (1889-1982).