Mama Papa.

[jones jones]

Mary Gwendolyn Mackintosh … (Mama)

Born 1 September 1880. Only daughter born into the fabulously wealthy Mackintosh family. Her father, Sir Robert, was one of the wealthiest men in Britain. When his wife died giving birth to Mary, he went straight home and blew his head off with a Purdy double barrel shotgun.

Mary was raised by her father’s eccentric and Bohemian sister, Sarah Dawson-Leale who taught her many things about life, especially how to have fun and not to give a stuff about what anyone thought.

When Mary was sixteen her aunt introduced her to the devastatingly handsome James Jones. He was five years her senior and several million pounds poorer, but she married him three months after her eighteenth birthday, when control of her father’s vast fortune was given to her.

James George Jones … (Papa)

The middle child of five, two brothers and two sisters, born to Doctor Vernon James and his wife Lola Doreen. Doctor Jones was a middle class small town GP who travelled to the Cape Colony during the Anglo Boer War and was killed there in one or other skirmish

James was working in the office of Sarah Dawson-Leale’s solicitor and it was here that she first saw and was smitten by his good looks. After sleeping with him a few times “just to check his virility,” she decided he would be a perfect match for her ward Mary.

She introduced them, and then gave the younger woman this advice:

“Marry him dear because he will father beautiful children and he’ll look wonderful on your arm. Of course any man that good looking will eventually end up in bed with many other women, but because you have control over the finances, he won’t stray far or for very long. So I would advise you to give him a son and perhaps one or two more children before you tell him you love him dearly, but you think yours should be an ‘open’ marriage. In other words, you agree that both of you are free to take lovers, but only very discreetly.”