Sheila Jones, my mother, died on Friday 31 October 2025. Born and raised in West Wales, she spent much of adulthood in England, as a primary teacher in a variety of schools. She returned to Wales when her husband, Robbie Jones, became a priest in the Anglican Church in Wales, finally moving to Derbyshire to be close to her son’s family.
Sheila Jones, née Lewis, was born in the Pembrokeshire village of Letterston. Her father, John Lewis, was one of thirteen children of Arnold and Alice Lewis. Arnold Lewis was an agricultural merchant – and, by all accounts, something of a domestic tyrant. He assigned careers to all his sons; John was to be a priest, and was sent to train in St David’s College, Lampeter. Rebelling against this, John dropped out of theological college to become a Conservative Party activist.
Sheila’s mother was Jean Howell, a miner’s daughter from Treharris, in the South Wales valleys. Jean was one of three daughters – but she was the one singled out by her family for education in Merthyr Grammar School, and then to train as a theatre nurse in Paddington Hospital, London. Jean came to Pembrokeshire to be the Matron at a TB sanatorium at Sealyham, near Wolfscastle, and it was there that she met John.
Sheila’s childhood was spent, first in the coastal village of Solva, then back in Letterston. She was an only child, but it was a big and close extended family; she became especially close to John’s four younger sisters Phyllis, Nansi, Peggy and Joan, and their children.
Her early childhood was a happy one – but she always enjoyed talking about the time she ran away with the Gypsies after arguing with her father. The dispute concerned the naming of five new kittens: while her father thought it was acceptable to name four of them after the Apostles, he didn’t think Jesus was an acceptable name for a cat. So Sheila (perhaps 7 years old or so?) packed her bag and took herself off to the Romany family living on Letterston Common, who entertained her for the day before taking her to her grandfather.
Even in remote West Wales, the second world war had an impact. John Lewis was employed in the Royal Naval Armaments Depot in Trecwn; less happily Sheila’s much-loved uncle, Charles Lewis, aircrew on Sunderland flying boats, was killed.
Sheila started at secondary school in Tasker’s School for Girls in Haverfordwest – her mother Jean was as ambitious for Sheila’s success as her own parents had been for her. Sheila didn’t talk about Tasker’s with a lot of affection – she was always ruefully bitter that she’d been punished for being seen in town without a hat, when it had just been blown off by one of Pembrokeshire’s frequent gales.
But she didn’t stay at Tasker’s for long – after the war, John took up work for the Conservative Party full time and moved to Aberystwyth as Party Agent. At Aber, Sheila went to Ardwyn Grammar School. She received a good education there – but even more importantly, in 1949, she met Robbie Jones, the love of her life, who she would marry seven years later.
Sheila’s ambition was to follow in her mother’s footsteps and become a nurse. A brief spell working in Bronglais Hospital convinced her mother, who knew the matron there well, that this was a vocation Sheila was just not cut out for. But it soon became clear where Sheila’s talents did lie.
Sheila enrolled at a teacher training college in Birmingham – but first, as soon as she turned 18, she took a role as an untrained primary teacher in an inner-city Birmingham school, teaching a class of 60 children from the most deprived of backgrounds. This was an eye-opening experience for her, as a girl from rural west Wales, encountering the outcomes of urban poverty, neglect and domestic violence. Yet, she would say later that she always felt entirely confident in handling any situation she encountered.
Her formal training lasted two years, after which she stayed teaching in Birmingham for a couple of years. In the meantime, her parents had moved to Neath, in industrial south Wales. In school holidays, Sheila would support her father in his doomed mission to lead a resurgence of the Conservative party in the South Wales Valleys. As she would describe it, a typical door-knocking experience would go something like this:
“Hello, we’re canvassing on behalf of the Conservative Party, can we count on your vote?”
“Duw duw, you poor things, of course not, but come in and have a cup of tea anyway.”
In 1956, Robbie and Sheila finally got married. They started their married life in a flat on the Aberystwyth sea front (it was called a flat, but in reality, it consisted of a bedroom in an attic and a kitchen in the basement). Sheila worked, first as a hotel receptionist, then a shop manager, while Robbie scraped a living as a journalist for the Cambrian News.
This didn’t last long – Robbie, liable as he was for National Service, was persuaded that he was better off, as a graduate, applying for a three-year commission rather than suffering two years as a squaddie. And so he was accepted as a short service officer in the RAF, being posted after training to RAF Wittering, near Stamford in Lincolnshire.
Sheila took a teaching job in a secondary modern school in Stamford. When Robbie’s time in the RAF came to an end, he joined her teaching in the same school. Meanwhile, their first, and only, child, Richard (me) arrived.
Robbie’s teaching experience in Stamford was not a great success. While Sheila always had a natural authority, and could quell a group of fractious teenagers with a single word, or just a look, Robbie was flailing in the role. Sheila suggested that he ask the RAF if they would take him back – which they did, giving him a full 16-year commission.
The RAF years involved very frequent moves – to the Isle of Man, to Feltwell and Brampton in East Anglia, to Cosford, near Wolverhampton, then finally Bicester in Oxfordshire. Despite the wandering lifestyle, Sheila largely enjoyed RAF life, with its structure and hierarchy.
Robbie had one overseas posting, in 1967, which was a much less happy experience. The posting was to Aden, in the final months of the bitter and violent insurgency there which led to a chaotic withdrawal by the British Forces. This was no place for families, so Sheila took Richard to live in Pwllheli, where her parents were currently living. This was a worrying, lonely and isolating experience, for both Sheila and Richard.
Despite the frequent moves, Sheila was always able to find work as a teacher. But it was in Cosford that she returned to teaching as a stable career. She had a particularly happy time in St Edburg’s School in Bicester. Then, after Robbie left the RAF in 1975, the family moved to Birmingham, where Sheila and Robbie spent the next eleven years.
This was a very professionally rewarding time for Sheila, culminating with her becoming Deputy Head of Somerville School, a large primary in Small Heath. In some ways this was a return to her beginnings as a teacher, in a large inner-city school in Birmingham. With Small Heath’s large Pakistani population, she became adept at teaching English as a second language, learnt a smattering of Urdu, and enjoyed supporting both the children and their parents in the challenges of bridging two cultures.
But Sheila had another career change in store. Robbie had a long-held ambition of becoming an Anglican priest, and Sheila fully supported him when the opportunity arose for him to fulfil this dream. She moved with Robbie to Birmingham’s Queen’s College, where he trained for ordination under the sponsorship of the Diocese of St David’s. In 1986 they moved back to Aberystwyth for Robbie to take up his curacy.
I don’t think Sheila enjoyed being back in Aber very much – I always sensed that for her it was very much the small town she had escaped from to broader horizons, and as such it held little nostalgia. Neither did she enjoy being the Rector’s wife in Robbie’s first parish. This was New Quay, some miles down the Ceredigion coast from Aberystwyth. But before long Robbie was offered, and gratefully accepted, the parish of Newport in Pembrokeshire.
Pembrokeshire was always home for Sheila, in her otherwise peripatetic life. While she lived in Birmingham, every Easter and Summer holiday was spent in a caravan in St Davids, to which the whole family would decamp, cats and dogs included.
Newport suited Sheila – and Robbie – much better than New Quay. It was a village with multiple communities, all of which Robbie and Sheila were able to relate to and find friends in. There were English retirees, often with a long family association with the place. Newport is notorious in Wales as a holiday retreat of “the crachach” – Wales’s cultural and political elite. And, of course, there were the native Pembrokeshire people who had grown up in the region and never left – who, with the detailed genealogical mental maps of country people everywhere, could place Sheila in the sprawling North Pembrokeshire extended kinship groups of Lewis’s and Phillips’s.
Sheila was always quite a private person; her bond with Robbie was always at the centre of her life. But she threw herself into voluntary and community activities in Newport. When the time came to retire, she and Robbie moved a few miles down the coast, to Fishguard.
It was the arrival of grandchildren, and the realisation of how far it is between remote Pembrokeshire and Richard’s home in Derbyshire, that prompted her final move. Robbie and Sheila threw themselves into the life of the village of Stoney Middleton – a retired priest always finds demands on his time in the English countryside. Eventually failing health caught up with both of them, and Robbie died in 2023 after a difficult final illness. Sheila was, in truth, bereft without him, but bore her situation with stoicism, taking satisfaction from seeing her grandchildren grow to adulthood, and taking stock of her full and varied life.