Gatty Wynne Jones (1859–1913): From Melbourne and Glandwr to the American Banjo

Among the descendants of William Jones of Glandwr Hall there were lawyers, clergymen, soldiers, businessmen and sportsmen. Arthur Owen Jones became one of the great cricketers of his generation, while other members of the family followed careers that would have been readily understood within the comfortable professional world from which they came. Gatty Wynne Jones chose something altogether different. He was expected, at least according to the surviving family story, to become a surgeon. Instead he became a banjo player.

That decision carried him across continents. Born in colonial Australia into a Welsh family with estates beside the Mawddach, educated for a time in England, associated with the merchant service and later with Paris, Gatty eventually built his adult life in the United States. By the closing years of the nineteenth century he was not simply playing the banjo for pleasure. He was earning his living from music, composing pieces for publication, teaching banjo, mandolin and guitar, writing instructional material and moving through the professional musical world of San Francisco, Illinois, St Louis, Minneapolis and California. In Utah he eventually established the Jones College of Music.

His is one of the more unexpected stories to emerge from the Glandwr family. It is also a useful reminder of how mobile the Victorian world could be. Gatty’s life connected Melbourne, London, the Welsh coast and the rapidly expanding cities of the American West. Almost nothing about it was provincial.

A Glandwr Family Born in Australia

Gatty belonged to the branch of the Jones family headed by William Halse Gatty Jones, usually known within the family simply as Gatty Jones. His father had been born in London in 1825, the son of William Jones, the successful solicitor who established Glandwr Hall near Barmouth. William Halse Gatty Jones followed the legal profession, but his life became closely connected with Australia. He practised as a solicitor in Melbourne and entered colonial politics, representing the constituency of Evelyn in the Victorian Legislative Assembly between 1860 and 1863. The official record of the Parliament of Victoria confirms both his legal career and his period as a colonial parliamentarian.

Gatty’s mother, Annie Laura Jones, brought another substantial Merionethshire inheritance into the family. She was the niece and adopted daughter of the Reverend John Jones of Borthwnog, Llanaber, and through her the Borthwnog estate entered the wider Glandwr holdings. Her marriage to William Halse Gatty Jones in 1849 therefore joined two prosperous families from the Dolgellau and Barmouth district. Their children consequently grew up within a family whose connections stretched between Merionethshire, the City of London and Australia.

Gatty Wynne Jones was the fifth of their children. My earlier family research recorded his birth in Melbourne on 14 August 1859, although the Australian birth material now indexed through FamilySearch gives 13 August and places the birth more specifically at South Yarra. The difference of a single day remains to be resolved from the original Victorian registration, but there is no doubt about the broader circumstances. Gatty was Australian born, the son of Welsh and London parents whose family fortunes had become entangled with the opportunities offered by the expanding British world.

His early childhood was unsettled by modern standards. Family research shows him moving between Australia and Britain while still very young. He briefly came to London with his mother in the early 1860s, and the family later returned more permanently to Britain. By the 1871 census the eleven-year-old Gatty was living with his family in Streatham. The original return gives a clearer impression of the household than the bare fact of residence suggests. William Halse Gatty Jones headed a substantial professional household, with Annie and their children, including Gatty, living alongside several domestic servants, while Gatty and his elder brother William were recorded as scholars. This was the comfortable Victorian world in which his future was initially imagined, one of education, professional advancement and domestic service. His father’s career had also returned to London, where the elder Gatty became a prominent solicitor, Commissioner for taking oaths in Chancery, member and eventually Master of the Skinners’ Company, and an Under Sheriff of London.

It was through his father’s connection with the Skinners’ Company that another part of the younger Gatty’s story becomes clearer. Tonbridge School had long-standing links with the Company, and William Halse Gatty Jones himself served as one of its governors. His son was duly sent there.

Tonbridge and a Life That Refused to Follow a Plan

The surviving Register of Tonbridge School records Gatty Jones as a pupil in 1872 and 1873, describing him as the second son of William Halse Gatty Jones. More importantly, the register provides one of the most revealing summaries of his early life. After leaving school, it states, Gatty spent three years in the merchant service before taking up music professionally. By the time the register was compiled, the former pupil was identified as the owner and director of the Jones College of Music in America.

The reference to the merchant service helps explain a previously obscure period in Gatty’s life. Earlier family research had established that he was back in Australia between about 1875 and 1878, without discovering precisely what he was doing there. Three years at sea would fit remarkably well into this period, although until a service or shipping record is discovered it would be unwise to insist that the two pieces of evidence describe exactly the same episode. What can now be said with confidence is that Gatty had experience of life at sea before settling upon music as his career.

There was apparently an attempt to steer him towards something more conventionally respectable. Family research records that he was sent to Paris to study medicine, with the intention that he should become a surgeon. It did not last. Gatty had little enthusiasm for the profession and abandoned his studies.

For a family of solicitors, landowners and professionals this could easily have been regarded as a disastrous lack of direction. In retrospect, however, it looks rather different. Music was not a youthful diversion which he later abandoned. It became his career for the remainder of his life.

San Francisco and the American Banjo

One of the most important discoveries about Gatty is that his American musical career began earlier than was previously understood. My original research placed his move to the United States in March 1892. That journey certainly took place, but American records now establish that he had already been working there several years earlier.

The 1889 Langley’s San Francisco Directory lists “Jones Gatty” as a music teacher at 944 Mission Street. Two years later the same directory was more specific. In 1891 he was listed as a teacher of the banjo, residing at 402 Jones Street. These are valuable records because they move the beginning of his known American professional career back to at least 1889. The voyage of 1892 must therefore have been a return to America rather than his first arrival.

He had entered the profession at an interesting moment. The banjo of Gatty’s period should not be confused entirely with the instrument’s later association with country and bluegrass music. It had originated among enslaved Africans and their descendants in the Caribbean and North America and was subsequently appropriated by nineteenth-century blackface minstrelsy. By the later Victorian period another musical culture had developed around it. Banjo, mandolin and guitar clubs became fashionable, the instruments entered middle-class parlours, professional teachers established studios, and musicians attempted to present the banjo as a serious instrument capable of technically demanding written music.

Gatty belonged firmly to this professional teaching and concert tradition. Indeed, evidence from the specialist press shows that he was already an experienced player by the time the San Francisco directories recorded him.

In October and November 1889, S. S. Stewart’s Banjo and Guitar Journal, one of America’s important specialist publications, advertised a composition called California Dance by Gatty Jones. The journal described the composer as little known publicly in that capacity, but nevertheless as somebody who had already acquired “many years’ practical experience” in banjo playing. That single contemporary observation is valuable. Gatty had not suddenly discovered the banjo after arriving in California. By 1889 he had already been playing it for years.

Another composition, Golden Gate Waltz, soon followed. Stewart’s catalogue described it as a banjo solo of moderate difficulty, neither elementary nor excessively demanding. It was still listed in the firm’s catalogue in 1890. The title itself suggests how thoroughly Gatty had absorbed his Californian surroundings. The son of a family whose English country house looked across the Mawddach estuary was now writing music named for the entrance to San Francisco Bay.

His music travelled further than he did. In August 1897 a concert by a banjo club in Napier, New Zealand, included Gatty’s Golden Gate Waltz among its programme. A composition by the Australian-born grandson of the man who built Glandwr Hall had crossed the Pacific and returned to Australasia in printed musical form.

Marriage and a Travelling Music Teacher

The American musical world of the 1890s was highly mobile, and Gatty seems to have moved where opportunities arose. A notice in S. S. Stewart’s Banjo and Guitar Journal records him teaching at the Conservatory of Music in Jacksonville, Illinois. It was in that same area that his private life became more settled. On 27 January 1893 he married May Blanche Taylor in Morgan County, Illinois.

The couple had two sons, Gatty Wynne Jones Jr and Gordon Lee Jones. Both would eventually lead distinctly American lives, and both would carry the family’s story still further away from Merionethshire.

The marriage did not end Gatty’s movements. By the later 1890s he was established in St Louis, Missouri, where contemporary musical journals identify him as a teacher of banjo, mandolin and guitar. This matters because it shows that describing him simply as a banjo player understates his abilities. Like many successful teachers of fretted instruments at the time, he worked across several related instruments and was capable of teaching pupils rather than merely performing himself.

His reputation among fellow musicians was considerable. In its May and June 1899 issue, The Cadenza, another important American journal devoted to the banjo, mandolin and guitar, described Gatty as an “exceptionally able performer and teacher” and as a composer of talent. The journal particularly praised his Olympia March, judging it a work of more than ordinary merit. This is perhaps the strongest contemporary assessment yet discovered of his professional standing. It came not from a family memoir written decades afterwards, but from the specialist musical press while he was actively working.

The 1900 United States census adds another dimension to this period of his career. Gatty was recorded as a “music dealer”, suggesting that his livelihood had expanded beyond teaching and performance into the commercial music trade. He was living with his wife and their two young sons, Gatty and Gordon, whose recorded birthplaces in Illinois and Missouri also reflect the family’s movement across the United States. The return contains discrepancies in Gatty’s age and apparent date of immigration, which do not sit comfortably with the contemporary San Francisco evidence already placing him in America by 1889. The census is therefore valuable not because every detail can be accepted literally, but because it shows the shape of the household and the commercial character of his musical career at the turn of the century.

Gatty Jones the Composer

The surviving catalogue of Gatty’s music is now large enough to show that composition formed a meaningful part of his career. Alongside California Dance, Golden Gate Waltz and Olympia March, pieces associated with him include Let Her Go Polka and Rustic Revelry. His Let Her Go Polka was printed complete with musical notation in the January 1902 issue of The Cadenza, while Rustic Revelry, a characteristic march for two banjos, was being commercially advertised later that year.

By the opening years of the twentieth century he had also turned considerable attention to the mandolin. This was commercially sensible. The mandolin was enjoying an extraordinary period of popularity in the United States, with clubs and orchestras appearing across the country. By the early 1890s it was beginning to overtake the banjo among fashionable amateur players.

Gatty published Original Solos for the Mandolin, a collection containing nine of his compositions. The titles included Katzenjammer Kids Two-step, Carnation Schottische, Twin City Patrol, Let Her Go Polka, Almeida Schottische, Amorita Waltz and Elfin Waltz. The collection was sold for fifty cents and was advertised nationally through the specialist musical press.

Two further titles in the collection employed racial language that is offensive today. Their presence should not simply be ignored. They belonged to an American popular entertainment culture still heavily influenced by blackface minstrelsy, a culture in which racist caricatures of African Americans were widespread in music, theatre and advertising. The banjo itself had African and African-American origins before being appropriated and transformed within minstrel entertainment and later middle-class musical culture. Gatty’s published repertoire therefore reflected not only the musical fashions of his period, but also some of its prejudices.

What is particularly interesting is that Gatty was not content merely to publish pieces for accomplished players. He also developed his own teaching material. Progressive Studies for the Mandolin was advertised as a concise instructional method containing scales, chords, technical exercises and thirteen compositions. A surviving contemporary advertisement called it one of the neatest and most concise mandolin methods then in print. Copies continued to circulate through the music trade, and an example has been catalogued by a specialist dealer as dating from about 1900.

This combination of player, composer and teacher tells us a great deal about Gatty. He had turned music into a business.

Minneapolis, California and Another New Beginning

Around the turn of the century Gatty’s published material was being handled by the American School of Music at 408 Nicollet Avenue in Minneapolis. Advertisements for both Progressive Studies for the Mandolin and Original Solos for the Mandolin gave the school’s Minneapolis address. It provides another stopping point in a career that seems almost constantly on the move.

California eventually drew him back west. A letter printed in The Cadenza in 1907 was sent by Gatty from Santa Monica. He explained that business had occupied much of his time, but enclosed payment for a five-year subscription to the journal. Even after almost two decades in professional music, he was still following developments in the specialist press.

There is also intriguing evidence that his interests briefly extended beyond music teaching. A later reconstruction of Santa Monica’s early cinema history, drawing upon the Los Angeles Times, records that in September 1908 the La Petite Theater on Third Street was sold by Gatty Jones to A. P. Tugwell. The original newspaper item still deserves examination before too much weight is placed upon it, but the identification is plausible. Gatty was living in Santa Monica at precisely this period. If confirmed, it would place him on the edges of another rapidly developing form of popular entertainment, the moving picture theatre.

The Tonbridge School register, compiled while Gatty was still alive, also gives Santa Monica as his address and describes him as owner and director of the Jones College of Music. This suggests that the college may initially have operated in California, or that the school’s administrative arrangements changed as Gatty moved. What is certain is that the institution soon became firmly established in Utah.

The Jones College of Music

By 1910 Gatty and his family were living in Utah, and the federal census provides an unusually clear picture of the household. Gatty was recorded as a musician, apparently working on his own account, while his wife was employed as a teacher in a public school. Their sons, Gatty Wynne junior and Gordon Lee, were both still students. It was therefore a household centred upon education and professional work, with music providing Gatty’s occupation while his wife had established a career of her own. The following year the Ogden city directory listed the Jones College of Music at 2448 Washington Avenue and named Gatty Jones as its director. In 1912 the College appeared again, now at 2434 Washington Avenue, with Gatty still serving as director and Samuel Jones recorded as manager.

The wording is significant. This was not merely a man offering a few private lessons from his home and giving the activity an impressive title. The college had a commercial address, appeared among Ogden’s educational institutions and had both a director and a manager. It represented the culmination of the career Gatty had chosen many years earlier when he rejected the profession intended for him.

There is an additional piece of evidence which reveals that the institution had genuine commercial value. After Gatty’s death, musician and businessman A. E. Maginiss became associated with the College. The Cadenza reported in 1915 that Maginiss had served as manager and director of the Jones College of Music and that, following the death of its founder, he purchased the business and reorganised it as the Angelus School of Music. Under its new name the school went on to enrol some 1,100 pupils in four years.

Whatever the later success owed to Maginiss, he had purchased something Gatty had already created. There was a school, a name, a teaching business and presumably a body of pupils worth acquiring.

That may be Gatty’s most tangible professional legacy.

Death in Utah

Gatty Wynne Jones died in Salt Lake City on 1 May 1913, aged only fifty-three. Earlier family research records the cause as a severe paralytic stroke. American genealogical records confirm the date and place of death and record his burial in Mount Olivet Cemetery, Salt Lake City.

He had travelled a remarkable distance from the world into which he had been born. His grandfather William Jones had risen through the London legal profession and created Glandwr Hall as the Welsh country seat of a successful family. Gatty’s father had taken that family into colonial Australia before returning to the professional world of London and eventually inheriting Glandwr. The younger Gatty might easily have followed the same pattern, becoming a doctor, lawyer or gentleman of independent means.

Instead he made himself into an American musician.

His sons continued the American story. Gatty Wynne Jones Jr later entered vaudeville under the stage name Gattison Jones, pursuing ambitions on stage and around the early motion-picture industry. Gordon Lee Jones served in the United States Navy during the First World War and later became a professional baseball player, appearing most prominently with the San Francisco Seals. Gordon’s son, Gordon Lee Jones Jr, eventually reached senior management at the Hearst Corporation.

Across only a few generations the family had moved from lawyers beside the Bank of England and a country house on the Mawddach to American theatre, professional baseball and one of the great American publishing corporations.

A Different Kind of Glandwr Legacy

Gatty Wynne Jones never became one of the nationally famous figures of his family. Unlike Arthur Owen Jones, there was no great sporting reputation to preserve his name. Nor did Gatty leave behind an institution which continued to carry his name for generations. The Jones College of Music disappeared into the Angelus School soon after his death, while the musical fashions upon which much of his career had depended also changed. The five-string banjo lost ground, the mandolin craze faded, recorded music transformed domestic entertainment, and jazz helped create new musical tastes.

It became remarkably easy for somebody like Gatty to vanish from memory.

Yet the surviving evidence shows that he deserves considerably more than a passing reference as the eccentric relative who played the banjo. He was a professional musician for more than twenty years. He was teaching music in San Francisco by 1889. His compositions were being published while he was still in his twenties and were played as far away as New Zealand. Contemporary professional journals praised his abilities as a performer, teacher and composer. He wrote instructional material, taught several instruments, established a music college and created a business valuable enough for another musician to purchase after his death.

There is something appealingly independent about the course his life took. Born into a family with a strong sense of profession, property and status, Gatty apparently decided that the career expected of him was simply not the one he wanted. The medicine was abandoned, the banjo remained.

For the history of the Jones family of Glandwr, his life matters precisely because it was different. It demonstrates what could happen when a member of a prosperous Victorian Welsh family stepped outside the usual routes of law, land, the church and the military. Gatty took the confidence, mobility and opportunities of that family background and carried them into the emerging entertainment culture of the United States.

The result was a life stretching from South Yarra and Glandwr to San Francisco, St Louis, Minneapolis, Santa Monica and Utah, played out to the sound of an instrument that was itself being transformed by American society.

For a man who was once supposed to become a surgeon, it was quite a journey.

Sources and Further Reading

• Antony David Davies, Old Llyfnant Valley Farming Families, particularly the sections concerning William Halse Gatty Jones and Gatty Wynne Jones.
• 1871 Census of England and Wales, Streatham household of William Halse Gatty Jones and family.
• 1900 United States Federal Census, household of Gatty Jones, recording him as a music dealer.
• 1910 United States Federal Census, Utah household of Gatty Jones, recording him as a musician, his wife as a public-school teacher, and their sons as students.
• The Register of Tonbridge School from 1826, entry for Gatty Jones, recording his attendance in 1872–73, merchant service and later musical career, Internet Archive.
• Parliament of Victoria, biographical record of William Halse Gatty Jones.
• Langley’s San Francisco Directory, 1889 and 1891, entries for Gatty Jones.
• S. S. Stewart’s Banjo and Guitar Journal, including advertisements and notices for California Dance, Golden Gate Waltz, Gatty’s teaching career and his mandolin publications.
• The Cadenza, 1899–1915, including contemporary assessments of Gatty Jones, Olympia March, Let Her Go Polka, his Santa Monica correspondence and the later history of the Jones College of Music.
• Polk’s Ogden City Directory, 1911 and 1912, entries for the Jones College of Music.
• FamilySearch, indexed Australian, British and American records for Gatty Jones and his family.
• Smithsonian Institution, resources on the African-American origins and nineteenth-century development of the banjo.
• National Library of New Zealand, New Zealand Graphic, 7 August 1897, report of a performance including Gatty Jones’s Golden Gate Waltz.