Frederic Wood Jones

Frederic Wood Jones was born on 23 January 1879 at Hackney, London, only son and youngest of three children of Charles Henry Jones, builder, slate merchant and architect, and his wife Lucy, née Allin. The family moved to Enfield where he attended local schools and showed enthusiasm for natural history. In 1897 he entered the London Hospital Medical College which in 1900 became part of the University of London where he graduated (B.Sc., 1903; M.B., B.S., 1904; D.Sc., 1910). In 1904 he became a member of the Royal College of Surgeons; he was made a fellow in 1930.

At the University of London he began a lifelong friendship with the anatomist (Sir) Arthur Keith whose encouragement influenced him to make his career in anatomy, but, as a young graduate, Wood Jones found medicine 'cramped and small when compared to biology' and jumped at the chance of a post as medical officer to the Eastern Extension Telegraph Co. on the Cocos-Keeling Islands (1905-06). There he met his future wife Gertrude, daughter of George Clunies-Ross, governor of Cocos-Keeling whom he married in London on 11 June 1910.

Wood Jones gained experience as an academic anatomist through teaching posts at the medical schools of the London, St Thomas's and the Royal Free hospitals, and at the University of Manchester. At the Royal Free (London School of Medicine for Women) he was appointed lecturer and head of department (1912) and professor of anatomy (1915).

Early in 1918 he joined the army as captain, Royal Army Medical Corps. As he was posted to the Special Military Surgical Hospital, Shepherd's Bush, London, he was still able to fit in some lectures for the school. 

On the recommendation of Sir Arthur Keith, Wood Jones was offered the Elder chair of anatomy at the University of Adelaide in 1919 and took up his duties in January 1920. These, he discovered to his dismay, had to be carried out in cramped quarters without adequate technical assistance or anatomical specimens. With his usual energy, and skill in presenting a case, he persuaded the university to build him a lecture theatre and provide a skilled technician with whom he could begin to assemble a museum. That Wood Jones was a brilliant teacher had been demonstrated in London. In Adelaide as, later, in Melbourne, his lectures were widely acclaimed for their infectious enthusiasm, absorbing interest, wit, clarity of exposition and superb blackboard draughtsmanship. Academic considerations apart, the Australian appointment had attracted him because of the opportunities it promised for study of the native fauna; and almost all his vacations, and spare money, were spent on field excursions to the inland and islands. 

He received the honorary degree of D.Sc. from the University of Adelaide in 1920.

In 1920 Wood Jones, as Adelaide's delegate to the Pan-Pacific Scientific Congress in Honolulu, had entered a wider anthropological community, and in 1927 he accepted an invitation to the Rockefeller chair of physical anthropology at the University of Hawaii. 

He died in London of cancer on 29 September 1954, survived by his wife.