Calls have been made to commemorate a Welsh journalist who uncovered the 1930s Holodomor famine in Ukraine with the naming of a public square in his hometown.
Gareth Jones was killed aged 29 after being taken hostage and held in captivity by Chinese troops while reporting on the Japanese invasion of Manchuria.
The Welsh journalist is widely credited for having exposed what happened to millions of Ukrainians, Kazakhs and Russians under the 1930s Soviet regime.
Jones’s great-nephew Philip Colley is now leading a campaign to commemorate his life by naming a currently unnamed public square after him in the waterfront area of Barry, which he frequented in his youth.
Colley said: “We hope Gareth’s memory and true story can finally be celebrated in his beloved hometown.
“Barry is the place to which he returned after each of his foreign travels and of which he always spoke with such affection in his writings.”
Jones has already been commemorated with a plaque at Aberystwyth University, an exhibition of his diaries at Cambridge University, and a commemorative plaque by Barry Town Council at Merthyr Dyfan cemetery in Barry, near his family’s gravestone.
The new call aims to go further to match the honour that five streets in Ukraine bear his name.
The New York Times initially denied Jones’s claims about the Holodomor, while the British Establishment threatened him with expulsion from the group.
Jones encountered historical figures including Adolf Hitler, US president Herbert Hoover, and Lenin’s widow Krupskaya during his time as a journalist.
Before his journalism career began, Jones worked as foreign affairs adviser for British prime minister David Lloyd George.
After Jones’s death in 1935, Lloyd George said: ‘‘He had a passion for finding out what was happening in foreign lands wherever there was trouble, and in pursuit of his investigations he shrank from no risk.
“Nothing escaped his observation, and he allowed no obstacle to turn from his course when he thought that there was some fact, which he could obtain. He had the almost unfailing knack of getting at things that matter.”
A commemorative event and illustrated talk about Jones’s life, which will feature the call for the public square to be named, will be held on Wednesday 13 August at 7pm at the Barry War Museum and Heritage Centre.
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