Sir George Roderick Jones (21 October 1877 – 23 January 1962) was a British journalist and news agency manager, who for most of his career worked for Reuters. From 1916, he was a significant shareholder in the company.
Contents
Life
Jones was born in Dukinfield, Cheshire, the only son of Roderick Patrick Jones, a Manchester hat salesman, by his marriage to Christina Drennan Gibb. His parents had been married at St Saviour's church, Manchester, on 13 September 1877, the month before his birth. His father was then a salesman, and his grandfather, John Jones, a butcher.
In 1894, Jones took up an invitation to join an aunt in Pretoria, then in the South African Republic. In 1895, he took a job as sub-editor on the Pretoria Press and later that year became an assistant to the Reuters correspondent in the Republic. In 1896, Jones's interview with Leander Starr Jameson in the aftermath of the Jameson Raid was networked internationally. In 1905, he became general manager of the Reuters office for British South Africa.
In April 1915, during the First World War, the Reuters general manager in London, Baron Herbert de Reuter, killed himself a few days after his wife had died, and with the company in financial difficulties. In October 1915, Jones was appointed as general manager. In 1916, he and the company chairman, Mark Napier, who was himself a financier, bought the company, with money being advanced to Jones by Sir Starr Jameson, chairman of the British South Africa Company. During the rest of the War, Reuters followed a carefully patriotic line, so much so that Jones was accused of being the British government's head of propaganda. He was knighted in the 1918 New Year Honours, in recognition of his services to journalism. In 1923, Reuters became the first news agency to use radio for sending news to its subscribers.