Theobald Jones
Entering the navy aged 13 during the Napoleonic Wars, the teenage Jones survived several naval engagements and the burning of his ship at night when he was 16.
An Orangeman and Ultra Tory[2] of "plain unassuming manners",[3] he sat in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom at Westminster from 1830 until he stood down from Parliament in 1857.
[1][5][7] The family traced their ancestry to Bryan Jones (died 1681), a Welshman who had been granted lands in Ireland by King James VI and I in 1622.
[5] Bryan's grandson Theophilus Jones (1666–1742) was a member of the Irish House of Commons from 1692 to 1742, for Sligo Borough and then County Leitrim.
[1][7] Jones joined the navy in 1803 as a volunteer midshipman aboard HMS Melpomene, taking part in the bombardment of French ports.
[8] He transferred in 1805 to the 36-gun frigate HMS Euryalus, under Captain Henry Blackwood, the brother of his father's second wife Anne.
[8] During the Dardanelles Operation, Jones was one of the survivors when Ajax caught fire at anchor off the Turkish island of Tenedos.
Within ten minutes heavy smoke prevented the launching of boats, and soon afterwards flames reached the main deck, forcing abandonment of the ship.
[8][10][11] For the remainder of the Dardanelles Operation, Jones served on the 40-gun fifth-rate frigate HMS Emdymion under Captain Thomas Bladen Capel.
When he returned to England, he joined fellow Ulsterman Blackwood on his latest command, the newly built 74-gun HMS Warspite.
[8] (Blackwood's disciplinarian command of Warspite was described in the letters of the midshipman James Cheape, who wrote of lashings being ordered almost daily).
[2] However, when the Irish-born Duke of Wellington became Prime Minister in 1828, he was alarmed by Daniel O'Connell's by-election victory in County Clare, and moved to enact Catholic emancipation.
The Londonderry City MP Sir George Hill had warned in 1826 that Dawson would be O'Connell's "chief mark", and the prediction proved accurate.
[19][20] In his election speech, Jones declared his independence from the administration, claiming that he would "never be found servilely walking in the wake of the minister".
He was challenged in 1852 by the Liberal barrister and land-reformer Samuel MacCurdy Greer, but held his seat, and stood down from Parliament at the 1857 general election,[19] aged 67.
His results were presented in a paper read to a meeting of the Natural History Society of Dublin in May 1864, and subsequently published as a book.
[26] Some of Jones's work is preserved in London and Helsinki,[26] and he bequeathed a substantial lichen collection to the natural history museum of the Royal Dublin Society (RDS), to which he had been elected a life member in 1838.
[30] After his death in London on 7 February 1868,[31] the society commended his large collection of fish fossils from the carboniferous limestones of Ireland.
