23 November 2020
We are saddened to hear that the historian and writer Jan Morris has died, aged 94, after a long, adventurous and daring life. She and her wife Elizabeth were neighbours and friends of Jonah and Judith, and decades ago, on her request, Jonah carved a headstone (“Here are two friends … at the end of one life”) for their grave when they came to be buried by their home in Llanystumdwy. In 2006 Jan Morris spoke eloquently and movingly at the unveiling of a memorial stone in Portmeirion commemorating Jonah’s many creative contributions to the village. She subsequently contributed a foreword of perfect economy to Peter Jones’s biography Jonah Jones: an Artist’s Life (published 2011), which captured exactly Jonah’s essence.