PRYCE-JONES, David Eugene Henry 1936-2025
Richard R
From the Telegraph of 19 Nov 2025: PRYCE-JONES David died peacefully at home on 17th November 2025, aged 89. Much loved husband of Clarissa, devoted father, grandfather and great-grandfather. Family flowers only; donations, if desired, to Blood Cancer UK.
He was s of Lt-Col of Alan Payan PRYCE-JONES 1908-2000 (gs of Sir Pryce PRYCE-JONES 1834-1920 who was f of Sir Pryce Edward PRYCE-JONES 1st Bt 1861-1926, as well 2xgt gs of 7th Viscount DOWNE 1812-57, as also 3xgt gs of 1st Baron BAGOT 1729-98, 2xgt gs of 2nd Earl GREY 1764-1845, 3xgt gs of 4th Earl of JERSEY 1735-1805, etc etc) and Baroness Thérèse FOULD-SPRINGER 1908-53. He m 1959 Hon Clarissa Sabina CACCIA b 1939 d of the LP Baron CACCIA 1905-90 and Anne Catherine 1910-2005 d of Sir George Lewis BARSTOW KCB 1874-1966 and Hon Enid Lillian LAWRENCE 1882-1970 d of 1st Baron TREVETHIN 1843-1936 and Jessie Elizabeth LAWRENCE 1852-1931, and had a son and three daus (incl Sonia 1970-72).
colinp
David Pryce-Jones, man of letters whose Unity Mitford biography exposed British anti-Semitism
Diana Mosley told him he was ‘too young to understand Unity or Nazism, but would live to see statues of Hitler and Goebbels across Europe’
David Pryce-Jones, who has died aged 89, was a man of letters, conservative journalist and author of a dozen novels as well as books on the Arab world, the death of Soviet communism, Paris under the German Reich, books of memoirs, and biographies of Evelyn Waugh, Cyril Connolly, Unity Mitford and Graham Greene.
Among other things Pryce-Jones worked for many years as a special correspondent for The Daily Telegraph. His prose style was highly polished, allusive, often ironic, but always with a strong undertone of moral thinking.
One reviewer described Pryce-Jones’s career as involving “a series of attempts to bridge the contradictions in his heritage”, contradictions implied in the title of his colourful 2015 memoir Fault Lines.
As the son of Alan Pryce-Jones, journalist and scion of an old Welsh family, and Thérèse (known as “Poppy”), née Fould-Springer, of a distinguished Franco-Austrian-Jewish banking dynasty, David lived through the destruction of the European Jewish side of his heritage and the exile of its surviving members, mostly to Britain [….]
An only child, David Eugene Henry Pryce-Jones was born in Vienna on February 15 1936. His mother, Thérèse, was a daughter of Baron Eugène Fould-Springer, a French-born banker, and Marie-Cecile, or Mitzi, whose father was the industrialist Baron Gustav Springer. Thérèse had a brother and two sisters, one of whom married the Spanish diplomat Eduardo Propper de Callejón and was grandmother of the actress Helena Bonham-Carter, and the other married Baron Elie de Rothschild. David Pryce-Jones described his mother’s family as “half-French, half-Austrian, altogether Jewish” [….]
David Pryce-Jones was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1980.
In 1959 he married Clarissa Caccia, daughter of the diplomat Harold (later Baron) Caccia. She survives him with two daughters and a son. Another daughter died in infancy.
David Pryce-Jones, born February 15 1936, died November 17 2025