Jarge Balsh & WM Jones - The Early Years

Author and actor – journalist and newspaper editor - stand-up comedian and singer - professional photographer and shopkeeper - public servant and manufacturer – William Marchant Jones was a remarkable man. He was all the more remarkable for being born into hard times. Will Jones was born on 26th March 1884, in the Somerset mining village of Coleford, into a family which was already slithering helplessly into dire poverty.
It had not always been so. His father had been born John Marchant in 1857 in Camden Town, London, and subsequently was adopted by a cabinet maker, John Hobday Jones, and his wife, Hannah. The couple had been married in 1833 at St Mary-le-Bone church, as soon as the young Hobday Jones finished a six year apprenticeship with his father, and so the marriage had been childless for many years before they took John Marchant into the family. When John Hobday Jones died, his widow decided to return to the place of her birth, Coleford, and she took her adopted son, now known as John Marchant Jones, back to Somerset with her.

Coleford in the early 1900's

Hannah set up a shop on the corner of High Street and Norton’s Hill, and the building is known to this day as “Camden House”. “Somerset” conjures up an image of rural idyll, all green fields and thatched cottages, cider and Cheddar cheese, but the reality of Coleford is very different. Although Coleford had its picture postcard corner south of the church, the main part of the village, which in the late 1800’s boasted a population of over a thousand, was a grey, utilitarian strip of stone-built miners’ cottages. This was Highbury, from which the dusty lanes led northwards towards the pit heads of Mackintosh, Newbury, Coal Barton, and Luckington.
John Marchant Jones, to judge from photographs taken of him with his children in later years, was a debonair, handsome man with a luxuriant moustache and a taste for snappy clothes. The worldly cockney must have cut quite a dash in the backwoods of Somerset and, predictably, he made a good marriage to Millicent Martin. Her father, Benjamin Martin, was a man of some substance, a mining surveyor and the first parish clerk of Holy Trinity, Coleford. Millicent brought with her the considerable dowry of three cottages and, as they moved into Brook Cottage, opposite the old Temperance Hall, John Marchant Jones could congratulate himself on having made a very good match.

John Marchant Jones with his children
Will Jones is top left

No one remembers how John Marchant Jones lost their money, but it wasn’t long before he was reduced to working as a sawyer in the pit yard at Newbury. The coal industry was weathering one of its periods of depression and falling prices, and in 1889 there was a strike throughout the Somerset coalfield. An iniquity of the time was the payment of wages on a sliding scale dependent on the price of coal. This led to the formation of a Miners’ Federation whose militant campaign for a minimum wage caused the great lock-out of 1893, when over three hundred thousand miners were out of work across the country for sixteen weeks. Jones was not a union man, and so his growing family was left without any form of income. Alma was the eldest, after whom came Will, Reg, Percy, Mabel and Cliff.
Pit villages are odd places. The cottages frequently were built by the colliery companies, the streets often radiating out from the pit-head and sometimes arranged in a deliberate hierarchy, the larger houses being intended for managers, supervisors, and so on. In the North Somerset coalfield the dwellings were built from the local stones, white and blue lias, which have the quality of looking rather grubby even when clean. Pit villages, however, are not always part of some industrial conglomeration but, like Coleford, sometimes exist incongruously in the middle of glorious countryside, an irony which pervades much of the writing of DH Lawrence.

Haymaking - Dick, Will Jones's son, is on the horse

Will Jones knew and loved the Somerset countryside - the deep, winding lanes, the thick woods and rich pastures - from which the tall chimneys and the winding wheels of the pit-heads remained often invisible. His early life revolved around the church school and the church of Holy Trinity where he was a chorister and, like so many village boys of the time, he helped to pump the organ during services. It was to give him a lifelong love of music.

Coleford church school in the 1890's
Will Jones is top left, next to his brothers Cliff, Percy & Reg

His childhood, however, ended abruptly when he was eleven. Since his father had lost his work at the pit, the family had existed on parish handouts of bread and tea. His mother had become bed-ridden, weakened by malnutrition and probably already suffering from the tuberculosis which would kill her four years later at the age of forty one. Will left school to look after his mother and siblings while his father, armed with a reference from the vicar of nearby Kilmersdon, tramped the neighbourhood seeking employment as a French polisher, a skill learnt in the old days with the Hobday Jones family.

Will Jones with his mother

Will took away with him from school a glowing reference from Mr. F Close, the Head Master. “I have much pleasure in recommending William Jones for any position requiring intelligence and diligent application in a boy. I have always found him most willing and obliging, thoroughly honest, and he would, I am sure, do his best to carry out the wishes of those over him.”
A year later matters at home had improved sufficiently for Will Jones to go to work for the first time, in the pit yard of the Mackintosh Colliery. He toiled on the batches, the smoking and flaming spoil heaps, recovering the usable coal from the slag, and sometimes did duty on the gates of the cage which took the miners and trucks to and from the bottom of the pit shaft.

Mackintosh pit yard

He loathed the work, and within a few months found something more congenial, an apprenticeship at the Coleford Co-Operative Society grocery stores. He served for three years, earning four shillings a week for the first year, five shillings for the second, and six shillings for the third. These wages would have been worth over a hundred pounds a week in today’s money, and would have made a considerable difference to the fortunes of the Jones family. With his apprenticeship completed, he went to work at Styles’s grocery shop in Paulton, riding home each weekend to Coleford on the pony which usually pulled the delivery cart. Subsequently he worked for the Star Tea Company in Frome.

Will Jones top left as an apprentice grocer