John Prichard-Jones

Sir John Prichard-Jones, 1st Baronet (31 May 1841 – 17 October 1917) was a self-made Welsh business man of the Victorian and Edwardian era. His main business was the London West End department store Dickins & Jones.

For most of his life, his name was John Jones. In 1917, a few years after being created a baronet, and a few months before his death, he changed his surname by deed poll to Prichard-Jones.

Born to a Welsh-speaking family at Tyn-Coed, a small farm near Newborough, Anglesey. His parents were Richard Jones, farmer, and Jane Jones, formerly Owen. He was aged one month on the 1841 census when he is recorded with father and mother Richard and Jane, aged 35 and 30, and siblings Elinor, Richard, William and Owen, aged 15, 9, 6 and 4. At the age of fourteen Jones was apprenticed to a draper in Caernarfon and afterwards moved to Pwllheli, then to Bangor and eventually, when he was nineteen, to London. In 1872 he entered the firm of Dickins, Smith & Stevens in Regent Street. There he was successively promoted to buyer, manager, director, chairman of the board and finally to partner, when the name of the store was changed to Dickins & Jones.

He was also involved in the management of other businesses and was prominent in movements for the promotion of workers' welfare, as well as supporting profit-sharing schemes for his employees. He was Treasurer of the Welsh National Museum and a member of the Council of the North Wales University College at Bangor, of which he was a generous benefactor, becoming Vice-President of the College Council in 1909. The University of Wales awarded him an honorary doctorate.

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