JONES, Thomas.
JONES, Thomas. A Diary with Letters 1931-1950. London: Oxford University Press, 1954. First edition.
Thomas Jones, C.H., was one of the most discreetly influential figures in twentieth-century British public life. A Welsh educationalist, civil servant and confidant of prime ministers, he served as Deputy Secretary to the Cabinet from 1916 to 1930, working closely with Lloyd George, Bonar Law, Stanley Baldwin and Ramsay MacDonald. His diaries and letters are valued for their unusually intimate view of Whitehall, Cabinet government, interwar politics, appeasement, war and the remaking of Britain after 1945.
Octavo, first edition, first impression. original brown cloth gilt, portrait frontispiece, 582 pp., in the original dust jacket. Signed “Portal” on the front free endpaper, from the private collection of Marshal of the Royal Air Force Lord Portal of Hungerford.
Lord Portal belonged to the same high world of British public service and national decision-making. A decorated First World War airman, he rose to become Marshal of the Royal Air Force and Chief of the Air Staff during the Second World War, standing at the centre of Britain’s wartime air strategy. In this copy, Jones’s private record of the political and administrative machinery of government is preserved in the library of one of the senior commanders shaped by that world.
A notable Whitehall and wartime association: the reflections of a Cabinet insider, owned by Britain’s wartime air chief. The dust jacket is a little rubbed and chipped to the edges and spine ends, with some soiling to the rear panel; the cloth remains clean and the contents are sound.
