Not in Reilly.


Alan Pryce-Jones, 1908-2000, literary critic and writer. During the Second World War he served in the intelligence corps, being a German speaker, was in France at the time of Dunkirk, and worked on Ultra at Bletchley, in a section devoted to the battle order of the German army. He served briefly on the staff of the Eighth Army in Trentino, northern Italy, and at Caserta in 1943, becoming a lieutenant-colonel, with the territorial decoration, and ended up in Vienna as a liaison officer with the Soviet army.



Jones, Alan Payan Pryce- (1908–2000), writer and critic, was born on 18 November 1908 at 17 South Street, Mayfair, London, the elder of two sons of Brevet Colonel Henry Morris Pryce-Jones (1878–1952) of the Coldstream Guards, and (Marion) Vere (1884–1956), daughter of Lieutenant-Colonel the Hon. Lewis Dawnay, a son of William Henry Dawnay, seventh Viscount Downe. The Pryce-Joneses came from Montgomery in Wales; Alan's grandfather was Sir Pryce Pryce-Jones (1834–1920), MP and chairman of Pryce-Jones Ltd, the woollen manufacturers based in Newtown.

Alan Pryce-Jones was educated at Eton College and at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he became an aesthete, establishing lifelong literary friendships with John Betjeman, Osbert Lancaster, Harold Acton, John Sutro, and Anthony Powell. His was a rebel generation where impish intelligence reigned over scholarship, and where, in his own words, it was fun to ‘flash through the world like a firework, often leaving a smell of burning behind’ (Pryce-Jones, 38). After two terms Pryce-Jones was gated, but he slipped out to a dance, was caught, and was sent down without a degree in 1928. He returned home in disgrace to be told he was unworthy even for service in the colonies. A military career was anathema to him, and he was advised to present himself to J. C. Squire, who was having his hair cut in the National Liberal Club. He was promptly employed as an unpaid assistant editor at the London Mercury, and worked there from 1928 until 1932. He introduced John Betjeman to the magazine, and commissioned short stories from his close friend James Stern. In 1931 he published The Spring Journey, inspired by his travels in the Middle East with Bobbie Pratt Barlow, a homosexual Coldstream Guards officer and a friend of his father. People in the South (1932), three novellas based on similar travels in Brazil, Chile, and Ecuador, and Private Opinion (1934), a work of ‘informal’ literary criticism, followed. Pink Danube (1939), written under the pseudonym Arthur Pumphrey, was a novel centred on the life of Adrian Bishop, at one time a high Anglican monk and friend of Maurice Bowra.

Having failed to marry Joan Eyres-Monsell (later Mrs Patrick Leigh-Fermor), because her father was unimpressed by Pryce-Jones's lack of prospects and removed her to India, on 28 December 1934 he married Baroness Thérèse Carmen May (Poppy) Fould-Springer (1914–1953), whose French-born Jewish family owned extensive property in Austria, as well as the Palais Abbatial at Royaumont, near Chantilly. They had one son, the writer David Pryce-Jones, born on 15 February 1936.

For some years until the Anschluss, Pryce-Jones enjoyed Viennese high life at Meidling, the Fould-Springer house in the Tivoligasse. But in 1937 he returned to Britain, joined the Liberal Party as their candidate for Louth, and also the officers' emergency reserve, ensuring that he would be called up. During the Second World War he served in the intelligence corps, being a German speaker, was in France at the time of Dunkirk, and worked on Ultra at Bletchley, in a section devoted to the battle order of the German army. He served briefly on the staff of the Eighth Army in Trentino, northern Italy, and at Caserta in 1943, becoming a lieutenant-colonel, with the territorial decoration, and ended up in Vienna as a liaison officer with the Soviet army.

In 1946 Pryce-Jones returned to literary life, joining Stanley Morison in the editorial offices of the Times Literary Supplement. He was its editor from 1948 until 1959, wielding considerable influence, and he set about widening the scope of the paper to include poetry and the hitherto neglected writings of other countries. He promoted Edwin Brock, Christopher Logue, W. S. Merwin, G. S. Fraser, Burns Singer, Alan Ross, and Philip Larkin, and introduced an almost totally unknown Austrian, Robert Musil, to an English readership. He became a trustee of the National Portrait Gallery and a council member of the Royal College of Music and of the Royal Literary Fund. He was president of the English PEN. He was closely involved with the early development of the Third Programme at the BBC, and wrote the libretto for Lennox Berkeley's opera Nelson (1954). He travelled widely for the British Council.

Pryce-Jones was widowed in 1953, but served as something of a cavaliere servante to his distant cousin Mary, duchess of Buccleuch. He was drama critic for The Observer for a year after leaving the TLS, but left England in 1960. Until 1963 he was adviser to the Ford Foundation in America, which distributed $15 million annually to the humanities and the arts; he was employed to help them dispose of yet more millions. He then collaborated on a musical, Vanity Fair, with Robin Pitt Miller, but the endeavour floundered. Pryce-Jones settled in Newport, Rhode Island, and sometimes in New York, working as a book critic for the New York Herald Tribune and other publications, and as drama critic for Theatre Arts. He continued to enjoy legendary stature in the literary hierarchy. He entertained generously and was himself lavishly entertained. He was one of the few travelling companions of Greta Garbo who did not betray her in print. A copy of his memoirs, The Bonus of Laughter (1987), was a rare work of literature in the shelves of her Manhattan apartment.

In 1968 Pryce-Jones married Mary Jean Thorne, a writer and a member of the Kempner family from Galveston, Texas, but she died in Paris a year later. As with his first wife's family, Alan was cherished by that of his second. Again they were rich, and in his old age he retired to Galveston, where they looked after him. He died at the University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, on 22 January 2000. He was buried on 13 February 2000 at Viarmes, near Chantilly, Oise, France. The recurring theme of Pryce-Jones's life was the delight of youth and the expectations of a glowing future versus talent dissipated and promise unfulfilled. He was a serious-looking man, dapper, elegant, with perfect, even rather affected manners, from whom the ready compliment sprang easily and effortlessly. His serious expression concealed an interest in gossip, of which he must have heard a great deal. Despite several tragedies in his own life, it could be argued that he led a charmed existence.

Hugo Vickers, Oxford National Dictionary of Biography