Now there’s a name that rings a bell. But why? It has a certain familiarity about it, and the reason might be as near as your kitchen.
Henry was born on 19 July 1862 in Hobart to Welsh parents John and Emma Jones. John was a clerk in a Hobart shipping office and considered an engaging personality, an amusing good fellow, while Emma was a straightlaced Wesleyan housewife. (Please don’t get all PC on me. We are talking mid-19th Century!) It seems Henry was a serious young man who took very much after his mother. Attending school until age 12, he excelled at commercial subjects.
On leaving school, he began work at George Peacock’s jam factory in Hobart in the essential but monotonous position of label sticker. A good worker, it was not long before he was given the opportunity to advance his work experience and within a few years, he had become an expert jam boiler. In April 1883, not yet quite 21, Henry married the striking auburn-haired Alice Glover. They were to have a large family of three boys and nine girls.
Although the Tasmanian company had thrived using the very best local fruit and the undoubted quality of the end product, there was increasing pressure from mainland competition. By 1885, barely 23 years of age but a proficient jam maker, Henry was promoted to factory foreman. Only four years later, on the retirement of George Peacock, he took control of the company with partners AW Palfreyman and Ernest Peacock. Under Jones’ management, the business strengthened and finally thrived, with superb new premises (site of a modern day upmarket hotel, set in the old building), built on the Hobart waterfront.
H Jones & Co went on from strength to strength. Beyond their range of quality jams, they diversified into canned vegetables, went into hop production and made way in the overseas export markets. During this period, Henry Jones, popularly dubbed ‘Jam Tin Jones’, adopted the brand name IXL, a wordplay based on the expression, “I excel.”
The partnership dissolved and a limited liability company formed; by 1909 a confederation of companies was established under the umbrella Henry Jones Co-Operative Ltd. Although there was some criticism of the organisation (it was a ‘horizontal monopoly’), it resulted in no policies harmful to the Australian consumer. It expanded into every Australian state as well as New Zealand and South Africa.
Jam may have been Henry Jones’ start, but it became perhaps a lesser aspect of his income. A shrewd investor, his greatest profits arose from tin mining in Thailand. He became a very wealthy man and a leading Australian financier. He was an advisor to the Commonwealth Bank and to the British government. A supporter of the war effort, he even gifted an aeroplane to the British Army. For his good works, he was knighted in 1919.
An energetic man who was ever prepared to work towards better outcomes for his relatively isolated island state, he established an export route direct to the British Isles from Hobart. He also managed some limited support on the thorny issue of trade across the Bass Strait – it was then and remains today an expensive strip of water to cross – by establishing a shipbuilding venture that had some limited success. He also successfully negotiated the establishment of woollen mills in Launceston by the English firms Kelsall & Kemp and Patons & Baldwins.
In the early years post-WW1, the rival Hobart jam factory of W D Peacock & Co was bought out. Henry Jones retired in 1922 and Frederick H Peacock, who had been retained as a general manager, succeeded him as head of the company. In time, production of jam went to Victoria, at first Prahran and later Shepparton. Company ownership – it was a plum ripe for the picking – went offshore for some years but is again in Australian ownership under the SPC Ardmona banner.
Henry Jones died in 1926, doing what he did best, negotiating with a big English tyre manufacturer to establish operations in Launceston.
You probably don’t know Henry Jones as an advocate, an investor, a promoter or a philanthropist… however, as a bloke who put his name on tins of jam? Oh yes, of course, that’s him!
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