Having originally set his sights on becoming a classical watercolourist, the Welsh-born Jones left the UK for Canada with his wife in 1957. Upon arriving in Edmonton, he found work as a house painter, but, having done a bit of freelance cartooning back home, he soon found himself peddling cartoons to local publications, delivering sketches to the publisher of the Edmonton Journal almost daily.

"He would chuckle pleasantly, but say no," remembers Jones, surveying the collection of originals and prints crowding the tiny gallery. Undeterred, he continued to sketch, and one afternoon in January of 1962, while watching workers scale the treacherous heights of a building being demolished on the corner of Jasper Avenue and 101 Street as the Western world was transfixed by American astronaut John Glenn's heroics as the first non-Soviet in space, he had an epiphany, drawing a simple cartoon on an envelope and delivering it to the Journal publisher, who this time relented, hiring Jones as the paper's full-time editorial cartoonist.

Jones went on to work for the Toronto Telelgram and then the Montreal Star in the '60s and '70s before coming back to Edmonton to work for the Sun in the '80s and finally retiring in the early '90s after returning to the Journal.