[1] His parents were likewise greatly involved in their community: the Jones family's land covered 10,000 acres, employing a large number of local people from villages such as Duckenfield.

[2] His mother also ran Happy Grove Secondary School in Hector's River as both Secretary of the Board of Governors and, at another time, its Acting Principal.

[1] There he found both academic and athletic success, earning the nickname 'the educated toe' and began to write plays, the first of which was Inherit this Land (first performed in Jamaica, 1951).

[1][5] After graduating from Haverford in 1949, he went to the Gaza Strip in Palestine with the American Friends Service Committee, which organised the refugee camps there under the auspices of the United Nations.

[1][6] Jones had previously provided similar relief work for the Committee in Mexico and was therefore tasked with overseeing a refugee camp of 30,000 people at Khan Yunis.

[1] In order to reach England, he and a friend stowed on a banana boat bound for London; from there, he took a taxi to Oxford paid for with money won playing poker during his voyage.

[2] At Oxford, Jones was a member of a clique of Rhodes scholars and international students, two of whom were Jamaican: the future editor of The Gleaner, Hector Wynter, and Neville Dawes, a fellow writer.

[7] Other members included the American mathematician Robert W. Bass and the producer Christopher Ralling, who latter collaborated with Jones on The Fight Against Slavery (1975).

[5][8][9][10] The Dub poets of the 1970s, namely Linton Kwesi Johnson, Mutabaruka and Mikey Smith, also recognise the poem as a significant influence.

Upon arriving in Philidelphia, he found that a policy decision that had impelled the company to hire non-white persons has been reversed and that his offer of a job has been rescinded.

Within six months of arriving to London, Burge produced his play The Widows of Jaffa for the BBC from 1956–7, which was met with great success and launched Jones's career.

He then wrote In a Backward Country, which the BBC produced in 1959, a play based directly on his family and adapting the Biblical story of David and his son Absalom.

[1] After Jamaica gained her independence from the British Empire in 1962, the call for land reform was a major factor in the incitement of the Jamaican political conflict.

The evocation of his brother in Jones's play would prove to be ill-omened as Kenneth would go on to become Minister of Communications and Works in Jamaica's first independent Cabinet but died under suspicious circumstances at a retreat in 1964, many suspecting him to have been murdered.

He found it difficult to work as a writer during this time and subsequently moved to New York City with his wife, writing a third play for the BBC before returning to London for its production.

It was a body horror film about people who had been irradiated and was a political statement against nuclear war, adapting H. L. Lawrence's novel Children of Light (1960).

[1] Jones regarded Moreau as 'the finest actress' he worked with in his career but shared Losey's disappointment with the final film which had been massively cut in the edit on the insistence of the studio.

[1] In this same period, Jones wrote The Madhouse on Castle Street for the BBC, who produced it in 1963: a now lost television play featuring the acting début of Bob Dylan.

[1] Jones and Losey's fourth and final project together was Modesty Blaise (1966), a spy comedy based on Peter O'Donnell and Jim Holdaway's eponymous comic strip.

Jones wrote the screenplay to be a Surrealistic parody of the James Bond films, attracting the attention of Harry Saltzman and Albert R.

[1] After the production of Modesty Blaise had ended, Saltzman and Broccoli offered Jones the task of adapting Len Deighton's 1963 espionage novel Funeral in Berlin.

[1] It took Rhodesia as its setting, on the verge of the state's 1965 Unilateral Declaration of Independence, and follows a group of black actors in their attempt to improvise a melodrama based on the ongoing racial turmoil.

In 1969 Jones wrote Two Gentlemen Sharing, adapting David Stuart Leslie's 1963 novel of the same name, writing about a black Caribbean diaspora man and a white Englishman belonging to an in ruinate gentry family.

The film explores fetishisation, homosexuality and racial politics, receiving an X certificate due to the censors fearing it would incite race riots.

The film follows John Grant, an English schoolteacher who loses his money at two-up and becomes beholden to the residents of the outback town of Bundanyabba.

In 1973, Jones was asked to rewrite Brian G. Hutton's horror film Night Watch to make the lead actress Elizabeth Taylor's part more to her liking.

[1] Jones was then approached by an old friend from Oxford, the producer Christopher Ralling, to write an episode of a documentary drama about the transatlantic slave trade for the BBC.

Jones wrote the script for John Huston's Escape to Victory (1981), starring Caine, Max von Sydow, Sylvester Stallone and the Brazilian footballer Pelé.

: Anthony Winkler and White West Indian Writing (2006), although Jones dismissed her approaches as being myopically focused on race, ignoring the human condition as a whole.