Edmund Britten Jones was the son of Edward Britten Jones, a South Australian Government surveyor, and Mary (nee Kirby). A good scholar, he was top of the final year of his medical course in Adelaide in 1910. This and his all-round distinction in various other university activities, resulted in his being awarded a Rhodes scholarship in 1912. This took him to Magdalen College, Oxford (1912-14) where he obtained first-class honours in the school of physiology.
In World War I ‘Teddy’ (as he was generally and affectionately known) served in the RAMC for four years, mainly in India, and in Bombay in 1915 he married Hilda, the daughter of an Adelaide barrister, Francis Fisher. One son (Richard, himself in due course a Fellow of the College) and two daughters were born to the marriage.
On his return to civilian life, he embarked upon country general practice at Penola, a small town in the south-east of South Australia. Subsequently he practised as a family doctor at Henley Beach, a seaside suburb of Adelaide, but in 1926 he returned to England to obtain his MRCP. He also received his MA (Oxon). After that he practised in Adelaide as a much sought-after consultant physician until his death in 1953.
Teddy’s main hospital appointment was as honorary physician to the Adelaide Children’s Hospital (1929-47) and he never joined the honorary staff of the Adelaide Hospital (which became ‘Royal’ in 1939) in spite of the fact that his private practice was predominantly adult-orientated. The reasons for this decision (which Teddy mildly regretted in later life) were very personal, but the Children’s Hospital certainly gained greatly as a result.
Other activities for the benefit of his colleagues and the community during those years included the presidency in 1933-34 of the South Australian branch of the BMA (after two years as its honorary medical secretary in 1927-29), participation in the establishment of the Adelaide Postgraduate School in Medicine, presidency of the Medical Board of SA (1950), and (from 1944 until his death) membership of the council of the University of Adelaide.
After becoming a foundation Fellow and councillor of The Royal Australasian College of Physicians in 1938, EBJ participated fully in the examinations and other activities (including a vice-presidency) of the College, apart from a year in the Middle East (1940-41) where he served, with the rank of lieutenant-colonel, as OC Medical, 2/2 Australian General Hospital, at Kantara. He was mentioned in dispatches for his devotion to duty.
Teddy’s knighthood - he received the accolade of Knight Bachelor personally in London during the Coronation Year, 1953 - was popular with all his colleagues, but whilst in London unhappily he had his first warning of cerebral vascular disease with a minor stroke. He recovered but succumbed to a massive haemorrhage at his home in Adelaide a few months later.
Sir Edmund was a very successful doctor, respected by his colleagues for his almost uncanny diagnostic acumen and his personal affability, and loved by his patients for his unfailing kindness. He remained always a devout Catholic and cared for many members of the Church, including a number of priests and the nursing sisters at Calvary Hospital in North Adelaide. He also helped and encouraged his younger colleagues in a way that was not usual amongst medical men in Adelaide in that era.
As a teacher, Teddy was at his best by the bedside, both with undergraduates and with family doctors who had called him in consultation. Like many other Adelaide clinicians at that time he did not publish many scientific papers. Nevertheless, it was his initiative that resulted in the Adelaide Children’s Hospital starting in 1947 its own journal, which is still published at occasional intervals as a monument to his inspiration.
A keen golfer to the end, he retained a lifelong interest as well in various other sports in which he had excelled in his youth, but his abiding love was probably horse-racing, most weekly metropolitan race meetings seeing Teddy with his binoculars eagerly scanning the field. At different times he was a part-owner of several, only moderately successful, racehorses, but no matter what their form he remained his usual unruffled and whimsical self.
His death at a comparatively early age was widely and deeply regretted but his influence lived on into the next generation in the hearts of many young physicians for whom he had been a shining example.