The Real Gareth Jones: Separating Fact from Fiction

Stephen Price

Welsh journalist Gareth Jones worked for Lloyd George, flew with Hitler, and reported first-hand on the Great Soviet famine in 1933 – and next month, an illustrated talk is set to take place in Cardiff, drawing on 40 years of research into the life and work of the man whose story was almost lost to the sands of time.

Presented by Jones’s great-nephew and founder of the Gareth Jones Society, Philip Colley, The Real Gareth Jones focuses on Jones’s 1933 journey through the Soviet Union, portrayed in the 2019 film Mr Jones (starring James Norton), and the evidence he gathered for his famine reports.

Jones was a brilliant reporter and a prolific chronicler of his times, covering subjects ranging from the rise of the Nazis to the decline of Welsh rural life.

His mother tongue was Welsh, and he was fluent in four other languages, including German, Russian and English.

A universalist, a pacifist and an insatiable traveller, he inspired expectations of great things among those who knew him. Tragically, his life was cut short when he was killed by bandits in Inner Mongolia.

In a eulogy delivered in his hometown of Barry, Jones was described as “an interpreter of nations to one another.”

Jones is now often associated with the Holodomor, but his contemporary reporting described a Bolshevik attack on the Soviet peasantry as a class, with starvation afflicting Ukrainian, Russian and Kazakh peasants.

When he publicly exposed the famine in Berlin on 29 March 1933, the first published report of his disclosure in the New York Evening Post quoted him as saying:

“Everywhere was the cry, ‘There is no bread. We are dying.’ This cry came from every part of Russia, from the Volga, Siberia, White Russia, the North Caucasus and Central Asia.”

For the first time, Colley will present fascinating details of Jones’s walk through the starvation-hit Soviet Russian and Ukrainian countryside, drawing on previously unpublished archival material and Jones’s own words, never before heard in public.

By allowing his great-uncle to speak for himself, Colley challenges widely accepted accounts of his reporting and examines how and why the story later became myth.

Philip Colley said: “This talk presents material that has not been published before. It looks carefully at what Gareth Jones actually reported in 1933 and how that reporting has been interpreted, and often misrepresented, since.”

Colley’s recent talks have regularly sold out at venues including the National Library of Wales, London Welsh Centre, Durning Library, Aberystwyth University and the Barry War Museum.

Event details

Date: Tuesday 24 November 2026
Time: 7:00 pm (doors open 6:30 pm)
Venue: Temple of Peace, The Council Chamber, King Edward VII Avenue, Cathays Park, Cardiff CF10 3AP
Speaker: Philip Colley
Tickets: £5 (£2.50 students/ seniors/ unwaged)
Book tickets: https://ticketlab.app/series/2903
Facebook Event: https://fb.me/e/6KLgEBjhC

---

Get more trusted Welsh news

Choose Nation.Cymru as a preferred source in Google News to see more of our journalism.