E. H. Jones (author)

Elias Henry Jones
Elias Henry Jones
Born	21 September 1883
Died	22 December 1942
Allegiance	United Kingdom
Service/branch	British Army
Years of service	22 September 1915 – 11 November 1918
Rank	Lieutenant
Battles/wars	World War I; Siege of Kut;
Other work	Financial Commissioner

Lieutenant Elias Henry Jones (21 September 1883 – 22 December 1942) was a Welsh officer in the Indian Army who, together with Australian C. W. Hill, escaped from the Yozgad prisoner of war camp in Turkey during the First World War. Their story was told in Jones' book The Road to En-dor.^[1]

Life[]

Jones joined the Indian Army and, after serving as a private soldier in a Volunteer Artillery Battery, was commissioned into the Indian Army Reserve of Officers on 22 September 1915. He served in Mesopotamia during the First World War as part of the Indian Expeditionary Force and taken prisoner in April 1916. He was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant on 22 September 1916.^[2]

After the war, he became Financial Commissioner and retired in 1922, settling in Bangor, North Wales.

Prison life and escape[]

Between February 1917 and October 1918, Jones and Hill convinced their Turkish captors that they were mediums adept at the Ouija board. The pair spent over a year conning the camp's commandant. Eventually they persuaded their Turkish captors they were insane and, after being moved to a hospital for the mentally ill in the summer of 1918, the two men played their roles as lunatics so successfully they also fooled the doctors and were returned home. Ironically, they arrived home only a few months before their brother officers were released from Yozgad.

Influences[]

The Road to En-dor was scripted for film in 2008 by Neil Gaiman and Penn Jillette (of Penn and Teller).^[3] A film was never produced.^[4]

Mark Valentine included an essay on The Road to En-Dor in his collection, A Wild Tumultory Library (2019).^[4]

In 2021, American author Margalit Fox published The Confidence Men: How Two Prisoners of War Engineered the Most Remarkable Escape in History, a retelling of the events described in Jone's memoir with additional context and research.^[4]