RIP - Sir Roger S Jones, Ex Governor and Parent

We are all gathered here today, perhaps to mourn the passing of Sir Roger Jones but I encourage you all to instead focus on remembering him for the immense character he was and the tremendous dedication and energy he brought to everything he did.

To understand my father, you must first understand the journey he undertook, from humble beginnings in a small village in North Wales, through his long journeys to the grammar school in Bala and then to the School of Pharmacy in Cardiff. Each step less well trodden by his peers and certainly, by the time he completed his MBA and joined Wellcome, he was a long way from Kansas, so to speak.

In fact, being deposited a long way from anywhere that any of us would recognise was exactly the path fates would send him, landing in post-colonial Nigeria in the 1970s, a start to the corporate career that would daunt many a lesser individual. Fortunately, he had a partner in his adventure in my mother, who uprooted her own life and created the homelife and grounding which was no small part of his future success. 

But my father was no ordinary man. The rumbunctious teenager had enough street smarts from his running pharmacies in drug-addled sixties London to have an unshakeable belief in his abilities, his adaptability and a well-developed personal moral code. The wily lessons learnt on the riverbank, fishing for trout and salmon, translated themselves into an ability to think outside the box (before that even became management jargon), making him a wildly successful salesperson in West Africa, not restricting himself to only selling Wellcome’s products but importing Land Rovers to boost the company’s profits.

Despite his many successes within Wellcome, he came to realise that climbing higher upthe Wellcome corporate structure was not possible for a boy from North Wales. Instead he left the easy path and steeled himself to generating sufficient capital to start his own enterprise. Some of his most dangerous/exciting stories come from this time, initially avoiding African contract killers and irrational army generals and then Soviet spies and political cadres on the other side of the Iron curtain.

To this purpose, he applied himself with the utmost diligence, leaving England on a Friday night, driving to Poland in one stint in his trusty Rover 3000, before heading deep into Warsaw Pact countries before returning home several days later, seemingly surviving on a diet of coffee, Borscht and vodka.

I remember posting him tapes of my sister and I singing Christmas carols,  because he would miss out on our family Christmas. We all understood from an early age,  the many sacrifices that my father undertook on our family’s behalf.

Although he was often away for these formative years, his character was always with us, guiding us and his return was always an occasion for rejoicing, even if we didn’t realise the danger at the time. My father had a gravity not related to his waistline but with the way he could listen to you, genuinely impart knowledge with real-world practical tips. His ability to hold the room in rapture was formidable, as his legendary stories were told with a rhetoric and content that would not shame the senate of Rome.

Eventually my father was able to set up his company, Penn Pharmaceuticals, which grew from a small niche operator into a large professional enterprise, which took us as a family from the South East of England to Brecon and the Tafarnaubach Industrial Estate. The long business journeys didn’t stop and the local constabulary seemed to be in a long-running game of attempting to catch my father speeding to his next meeting, always seemingly hovering around 9 points on his licence.

Steadily the business grew and my father’s role in the local training and Enterprise groups also grew, initially to try to provide suitable employees for the business but, after a time, it became more of a morally-driven mission to improve the chances for the disadvantaged youth of the South Wales valleys, perhaps seeing elements of his own upbringing in theirs and trying to give back to the community.

This became a platform for developing boardroom skills and influence, which led to leading the Welsh Development Agency, giving him the chance to really affect the support available to employees and enterprise in Wales as a whole. Subsequently, he was chosen to become the Chairman of BBC Wales, leading it and Children in Need for many happy years, enjoying the time he now had after successfully selling his company.

The finesse and achievements brought honours, first the OBE (other blighter’s efforts) and the knighthood, tangible evidence of the success he had wrought from the  raw materials of his start in life. If ever there was someone who could claim to have pulled themselves up by their boot-straps, it was my father.

It would have been easy to have rested on his many laurels but he never stopped – unbeknownst to me, he had undertaken a multi-decadal mission to read almost the entire classical literary cannon on his long trips away, furnishing himself with a deep literary education and ease that emerged in his quoting of obscure poetry at opportune (and inopportune) moments.

So, in summary, my father was a complex man, who achieved more than most through the many different stages of his life, driven like no-one I have ever otherwise met, relentless in his championing of his beliefs and willingly sacrificed himself to achieve his overwhelming successes, right until his dying day, quoting poetry on his deathbed, exactly the way he would have wanted. To Excelsior!

Sir Roger, whose wife, Lady Ann, died last year, is survived by his daughter Bryony, son Hefin, and three grandchildren, Tomos, Aneira and Cerys.

Thansk you Hefin Jones (SDA, 90-97)