David Ivon Jones was born in Aberystwyth in 1883.
Jones was orphaned as a young child and brought up by his grandparents, but his grandmother also died when he was a boy.
While still in his teens, he converted from Methodism to Unitarianism, braving ostracism from his family and community. He worshipped at the Unitarian chapel in New Street.
A few months later, Jones left Wales, in search of a drier climate to escape the tuberculosis that would eventually kill him.
He spent three years in New Zealand There he hunted rabbits for a living before moving to South Africa in 1910, settling in the Orange Free State and joining a brother who had opened a trading store.
In fact, five of his eight siblings moved from Aberystwyth to South Africa, while a sixth settled in Canada.
He later moved to Johannesburg. and joined the South African Labour Party (SALP) in 1911 and played a minor part in the general strikes by white workers that rocked the Witwatersrand in 1913.
He was one of the first whites in South Africa to champion equal rights for Black South Africans, was imprisoned and is still honored by the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party for his work.
A great theorist and publicist, he was elected general secretary of the Labour Party in 1914 but in1915 broke from the Labour Party to form the International Socialist League, of which he became the first Secretary-editor, responsible for producing the weekly newspaper, The International.
David Ivon Jones and Sidney Percival Bunting translated the concept of social revolution into a struggle for a "black republic" and a "democratic native republic, with equal rights for all races.
Wasting away with TB, Jones left South Africa for Moscow in November 1920.
While in Moscow Jones did a great deal of writing. As well as being an associate of Lenin he was one of the first people to translate some of the Communist leader's works into English. He died in Yalta on 13 April 1924.His grave is in the Novodevichy cemetery in Moscow.
A television documentary about David Ivon Jones was made by Welsh historian, Gwyn Alf Williams in the 1990s
A book about Jones' early life - The Making of an Unitarian - by Gwyn Alf Williams was published in 1995
There is a plaque on the Unitarian Chapel in New Street, Aberystwyth where David Ivon Jones worshipped that commemorate his involvement with Unitarianism.
Born in 1883, David Ivon Jones was a rabbit hunter, founder member of the South African Communist Party and one of the first people to translate Lenin's work into English.
