Tristan Jones
Far be it for this storyteller
to write a lot about another storyteller: Tristan Jones, sailor, wordsmith,
raconteur, joker and tough guy. He was a man born out of his
time: he would have boarded a Spanish galleon, cutlass in his mouth,
believing that England expects every man to do his duty to God and the
Crown. Even though he claimed to be Welsh (along with many
other claims) he loved England. He believed in Justice and
Fair Play, and he believed that England had brought both to its far flung
Empire. Foreigners, starting from Calais, did not understand the
meaning of Fair Play. It was a strange credo for a man who
was born a victim to the heartlessness of England in the early part of
the 20th century.
Arthur Jones was born the illegitimate
son of a Lancashire mill girl. He went from an orphanage to become a boy
sailor in the Royal Navy when it ruled the world. He was a stoker in a
coal burning ship plying from America to England and when the customs officers
peered down at him, long shovel in hand, between the furnace door and the coal
pile, one of them shouted: “Hey, mate - do you work down there?” “Yes,
matey” he called back. “Right ... anything you’ve
got - you can keep.”
He was short, wiry, with muscles
like whipcord and he sported a small tattoo, a star, on his left earlobe.
I was with him when he adopted
his new name. We strolled past Juan Jack’s bar in San Antonio, Ibiza,
laughing at the local cops who made Jack change the sign Jack’s
Bar, and replace it with a Spanish equivalent. The next bar we came
to was called Tristan’s bar -- and Tristan Jones, author and adventurer,
was born.
He always claimed I had inspired
him to write, and twelve books later he had an enormous following worldwide who,
even when some of his tall tales were exposed, they stayed his fans for ever. Click
on amazon.com and see his work.
All his life, he wanted a family. He
invented a father, saying he had been a lighthouse keeper and claiming to have
been born off the island of Tristan da Cunha, saying that his Dad had thrown
him into the Mersey to teach him how to swim. He invented a sister and
said she lived in Wales, but she was only another figment of the imagination
of an orphan boy. His schooling had been excellent and he wrote brilliant
letters and descriptive prose which could outshine an army of literary critics
on the posh papers.
The Sunday Times turned down
backing his adventure which became The Incredible Voyage. In The Flask
pub in Hampstead he said to me: “If my name had been Colonel Blashford
Snell, they would have backed me.” His great sea story “Ice” was
partly true and partly invented, for he had been trapped in Finland that winter,
going slightly mad cheating himself at chess.
“When I sailed on and
saw a neon light ashore, I thought I was in bloody Brussels,” he said
over lunch that Sunday, when he signed the book: “To Peter who knows
how, and Carolyn and Rupert who know why.” And added: “The
roast beef was memorable”
Most of his life he was broke. He
was getting £6 a week pension from the Royal Navy when I met him and it
was reduced to £2 a week when they discovered he was chartering to tourists. The
Bishop of Chichester’s sister, Peggy Middleton, had put it on her tax returns. If
newspapers and some people in the yachting world scorned him, then he would show
them. He sailed over the ground where Papillon said he had escaped
from Devil’s Island, and realised that Papillon had faked it, the currents
were all wrong, and it could not have been done, so he decided to fake part of “Ice”. Nevertheless
it was a great read and has its fans all over the world, as Papillon had. A
professional writer would have done it as a novel and not as an autobiography. But
Jones didn’t give a damn, anyway: all he wanted was enough
money to finance his next voyage.
A French yachtsman made the
mistake of boasting: “My new mast is the tallest in all zee world.” Jones
sailed on the Dead Sea and then on Lake Titicaca, just to send him a postcard: “MY
mast is the tallest in the world: 12,500 feet high!” and so he entered
the Guinness book of Records.
Arthur Tristan Jones was one
of the great characters of Ibiza in the late 60’s and early 70’s,
as he appears in Volume III of my memoirs “Bogged Down in County Lyric” pub-crawling
in the Calle Mayor and along the waterfront. Learning the ropes, I sailed
with him the length of the east coast of Majorca, and almost capsized off the
island of Cabrera. Later we circumnavigated the islands off the coast of Jugoslavia,
Brac, Hvar,
Korcula etc.
In Ibiza I had told him that
Van Trompe had attached a whip to his mast to whip the British off the high seas,
but Drake had attached a broom to his mast, to sweep the seas clean of the Dutch
and the Dons. Leaving my hotel in blustery weather, I would walk on the
waterfront and see, at the end of the mole, the Cresswell, the old Northumberland
lifeboat, with a Jolly Roger and a brush twisting and flapping in the wind, and
know that the master mariner was below, sleeping it off until the storm abated.
Drink taken, we sang sea chanties
together: Maggie Mae, The Holy Ground, Fiddlers Green, and, in Welsh: Sad
am I, without thee...
and I would recite Drake’s Drum (“Cap’n art thou sleeping
there below? Slung a’tween the roundshot, in Nombre de Dios
Bay and dreamin’ all the time of Plymouth Ho! ”)
“Some day, boy-ho, I’ll
drop my hook in Nombre de Dios Bay. I’ll send you a postcard.”