The Revd. Canon John Eric Gethyn-Jones, M.B.E., T.D., M.A.

Eric Gethyn-Jones was born in Wales on 9 October 1909 but spent almost his whole life in Gloucestershire, attending the Crypt School in Gloucester before going up to Pembroke College, Oxford. He was ordained priest in 1935 and, after a short curacy at St Catherine's, Gloucester, became curate to his father in the parishes of Dymock and Kempley. Gethyn-Jones had joined the Territorial Army in 1937 and consequently was mobilised on the outbreak of war. He served gallantly as chaplain to the 5th Gloucestershire Regiment, surviving the Dunkirk evacuation and landing at the Normandy beach-head in June 1944. On demobilisation he returned to his Gloucestershire parishes and developed a practical interest in local history, which led him to write the histories of his two churches and their villages. The twelfth-century wall-paintings in Kempley church concerned him greatly; they had been whitewashed during the Reformation and later exposed by the Victorians but covered with a shellac varnish. Gethyn-Jones persuaded the Dulverton Trust and Historic Churches Trust to employ Eve Baker to conserve the frescoes and he later published an account of the project in St Mary's Church, Kempley, and its Paintings: a case history 1872-1958 (1961). In 1967, although reluctant to leave his former parishes, Gethyn-Jones was appointed vicar of Berkeley with Wick, Breadstone and Newport, a move which revealed new opportunities for historical research. He published conclusive evidence that a group from Berkeley had founded the first settlement in Virginia: George Thorpe and the Berkeley Company: a Gloucestershire Enterprise in Virginia, in 1982, and was subsequently invited to celebrate Thanksgiving at the Berkeley Plantation in the United States. His first home in Berkeley, the Chantry, had been occupied by Edward Jenner, the eighteenth-century discoverer of vaccination, and inevitably Gethyn-Jones became interested in the pioneer's life and work. The Jenner Trust, of which Gethyn-Jones was a founder member, was inaugurated in 1966 and he was also instrumental in establishing a permanent Jenner Museum at the Chantry. Gethyn-Jones' long association with the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society began in 1950; he served on its council, became its president and eventually an honorary member. He launched the first of the B.G.A.S.'s overseas meetings in 1980 and, with his wife, led them annually until 1984. He served as Honorary Senior Chaplain to Southern Command and was an Honorary Chaplain to the Queen. Nearer home, he officiated at the funeral service of the late Dame Joan Evans, P.S.A., at Wotton-under-Edge in 1977, she, characteristically, having apprised him of her wishes well in advance. Gethyn-Jones' papers are deposited at the County Record Office, the B.G.A.S. library, the Gloucester Regimental Museum and the Jenner Museum. He died on 9 November 1995; his funeral service was conducted in Berkeley Church with full military honours and his ashes buried in Kempley churchyard under a headstone of Welsh slate.