Born at Llanfairpwll, Anglesey, on 6 December 1926, the son of Leslie William Jones MRCS, a general practitioner, and Prudence Mary, née Snelling, he was of the fourth generation in his family to become a doctor. He was educated at the Llanfairpwll Elementary School, Hillgrove School, Bangor, Epsom College, and finally Emmanuel College, Cambridge, whence he gained the Price Entrance Scholarship to the London Hospital in 1946 and there did his clinical training and won the Anderson Prize in clinical medicine, qualified in 1949 and became in turn house physician, house surgeon and later senior resident accoucheur. After this he joined his father in general practice in Anglesey, where he spent six years, during which he gained the MRCOG and an MD, an unusual achievement from a rural general practice. Unusual too was the breadth of his experience, for he had worked as a ship's doctor on voyages to Australia, as well as studying obstetrics and gynaecology in America. He returned to the London Hopsital as senior registrar in obstetrics and gynaecology, during which time he took the FRCS and developed a particular interest in urinary diversion. In 1955 he married Mary Snelling, by whom he had three sons (one of whom continued the family tradition of general practice) and one daughter. He was a man of great energy, a keen gardener, photographer and genealogist, and a particularly enthusiastic Liveryman of the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries. He died on 23 March 1994 in his birthplace, Llanfairpwll.