Disley Jones

Clifford Disley Jones (15 January 19264 June 2005) was an English stage and film designer.

Life Jones was born in Burton upon Trent, Staffordshire, and left his private school after the failure of his father's timber business. While at the Lyric, Eleanor Fazan and Jones collaborated on the revue One to Another, persuading Bamber Gascoigne, John Mortimer and Harold Pinter to write lyrics for it.

Musicals Jones worked on included Anthony Newley's The Good Old Bad Old Days and Dan Farson's Nights at the Comedy.

The first television production designed by Jones was All Summer Long, in 1960. He had previously designed a production of The Mikado for the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company at the Savoy Theatre, and was subsequently production designer on the 1966 film version of that comic opera. He also worked on the 1972 horror film Tower Of Evil, starring Robin Askwith.

Final years Jones ran Them and Theirs, a shop in St Christopher's Place, off London's Oxford Street, which sold commemorative ceramics and picture postcards. Jones had always been a collector of memorabilia and art works.

In the mid-1990s Jones succeeded the late Reginald Woolley, as the resident designer of the Players' Theatre. He redesigned the space under Charing Cross Bridge, and his annual Victorian Christmas pantomimes became notable.

Soon after quitting the Players, he was diagnosed with AIDS. He was stoic upon his AIDS diagnosis, saying "You can hardly be surprised, the way I've carried on." Jones benefitted from treatment, and returned to work, conceiving imaginative projects for films and plays, of which none were brought to fruition.

Jones' partner for almost forty years was Reginald Cornish, who he met at the College Theatre in Coventry. There were together until Cornish's death in 1985. They moved to Spain in the mid-1970s, due to Cornish's health, and ran a restaurant called the Wide-Mouthed Frog in Estepona on the Costa del Sol. The restaurant attracted many of Jones's friends from showbusiness. Jones returned to the United Kingdom following Cornish's death.

Jones was a regular in the French House pub in Soho, and his photograph is a fixture on the walls of the pub. His obituary in The Guardian described the lifestyle of his last years as "...despite no visible means of support apart from his state pension, somehow managed to live with an air of grand extravagance. Only three days before his sudden death, he had returned from a holiday in the south of France, short of cash but full of new ideas." Disley spent his last years in Kennington, in sheltered housing where he planted a garden, and threw parties for his fellow-residents. Of his demeanour the Guardian said "Tall, unintentionally overbearing, loud- spoken and fruity in vocabulary, he was a handful".