Jonah Jones was a sculptor and novelist who occupied the hot seat as director of the National College of Art and Design in the 1970s. His appointment followed a prolonged period of student unrest marked by sit-ins, closures, expulsions and the sacking of staff deemed to be sympathetic to the students.
The NCAD was still in turmoil when he arrived in 1974. Four teachers who had been dismissed were in dispute with the college board. Students were angry that longstanding grievances had not been addressed. But they were impressed by Jones's "progressive educational ideas" and looked to him to introduce reforms.
He is credited with bringing order out of chaos and establishing an uneasy peace. Although his term of office was enlivened by frequent confrontations and ultimatums, he claimed in 1980 to have enjoyed it all.
"I had the support of the board throughout and, whatever domestic quarrels we had, I enjoyed the support of the staff and students as well.
"I received great personal kindness as long as I was there and I succeeded in introducing an academic faculty structure and a students' union and in bringing the college to degree status."
However, on his departure in 1978 he admitted that the running of the college had been "a bed of nails".
Staff members were up in arms about college administration and recruitment procedures and strongly objected to the number of senior jobs awarded to "non-nationals".
Student optimism had given way to cynicism.
Jonah Jones was born in Washington, Co Durham, on February 17th, 1919, the son of a miner who marched to London in the Jarrow Crusade.
Having left grammar school at 16, he attended night classes at the King Edward School of Art in Newcastle, where he was introduced to the art of lettering.
As a young man he became interested in the Society of Friends, attending meetings for several years. At the outbreak of the second World War, he registered as a conscientious objector and was assigned to forestry work.
After a few years, however, he felt his duty lay in service with the Royal Army Medical Corps.
He saw service in Germany and was in Belsen shortly after its liberation in April 1945.
What he saw there coloured his attitude to Germans and Germany thereafter. He met his wife, Judith Maro, in Palestine and they married secretly in defiance of military regulations.
Jones having discovered his Welsh roots, they settled near Porthmadog, Caernarfonshire, where he worked as a sculptor.
He soon established a reputation as a master craftsman in stone.
He particularly enjoyed working in Carrara marble and Welsh slate.
His wartime experience led him to question Quaker philosophy and, diagnosed with tuberculosis, he moved towards formal religious precepts.
In the Eric Gill workshops at Pigotts in Buckinghamshire he encountered the legacy of the founder's Thomism. He was received into the Catholic Church in 1955, although he later became an agnostic.
In 1961 he was appointed to the British National Council for Diplomas in Art and Design, and from 1968 to 1971 was chairman of the council's fine art panel. He was a governor of Newcastle Polytechnic and Loughborough College of Art and a member of the sculpture faculty at the British School in Rome.
His first novel, A Tree May Fall, was published in 1980. It tells the story of a young English Quaker who puts aside his pacifist convictions to go to the aid of Belgium in 1916.
Joining the British army, he finds himself in Ireland instead, experiencing a crisis of conscience as he and his comrades march from Kingstown into the bloody ambush at Mount Street Bridge.
His second novel, Zorn (1986), is about a German-Jewish refugee in Britain. He also wrote a guidebook, The Lakes of North Wales (1983), and a volume of essays, The Gallipoli Diary (1989). His biography of the architect Clough Williams-Ellis was published in 1997.
Notable commissions include windows, sculpture, altar furniture and grilles at Ratcliffe College, windows and sculpture at Ampleforth Abbey and the Gerard Manley Hopkins windows at Loyola Hall, Liverpool. Other work includes busts of Sir Huw Wheldon and Bertrand Russell.
"I turn from sculpture to word and back again like a schizophrenic. I have to be restrained from work," he told The Irish Times in 1980.
"The idea, of course, is the important thing with both sculpture and writing, and after that the work is almost soporific. Less so with writing, for there the medium itself is part of the message and every word counts, whereas every chisel stroke doesn't."
He and his wife moved to Cardiff in 1991. Arthritis forced him to give up working in stone, but he turned to watercolours and regularly exhibited his work, most recently in Malvern only weeks before his death.
His wife, two sons and a daughter survive him.
Jonah Jones: born February 17th, 1919; died November 29th, 2004