As spring turned to summer in 1983, the 'Sunday Express' published a feature-length article on Jago Stone, headlined 'The Bar Stool Fantasies of a Cad'. That admirable piece of journalism by Denis Pitts, one of Fleet street's most accomplished writers, provides the initial focus for Chapter 2 in my biography of Jago. My late father-in-law, Ronald Watkins (see my eulogy for Ronald using this link) had given us the faded newspaper cutting sometime in the late 1990s. Only then did we learn that the artist, Jago Stone, whose palette-knife and oil paintings graced the walls in our home, had spent nearly twenty years in gaol before he was released in 1967 at the age of 39.
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| Jago's gift to my wife, Louise, presented as he left the Gerrards Cross area around 1970 |
When I first read this piece – and
for a long time afterwards, I had little reason to move beyond what Denis Pitts
sets out as his impression of Jago – a bit of a card, a bar stool character in
his mid-fifties, an affable English eccentric proud of being a reformed
gaolbird. That of course was exactly what Jago was acting out. He had the pub regulars
as his audience and a man come up from London to do the interview. The playhouse
of the local hostelry provided the perfect setting for his performance. And
what a brilliant choice of venue for the interview. The pub was called ‘Up the Garden Path’. Jago, the pied piper, leading his listeners
on. Yet it was all true. As Denis says, the
