Dave Jones Bio

Dave Jones initially began martial arts as a 7yr old with boxing. His father had been a forces middleweight amateur and he followed him into the sport but when his father was forced to retire a few years later and began training in Judo, he followed him there too. The Midlands club they had joined had become part of Kenshiro Abbe’s newly-founded British Judo Council and although the main direction of that club was Judo, because of Abbe’s broad martial art experience (as well  as being 8th Dan Judo, he was also a 6th Dan in Aikido and Kendo) a broad interest in all Japanese martial arts was engendered.  By chance while attending at a course organised by Abbe in North London, a Japanese Karate master, Mitsusuke Harada, was present and gave a thrilling demonstration. Within a matter of weeks Karate was also being taught at Dave Jones’s home club and as a teenager, although Judo remained the main competitive element, training time was split between the three disciplines of Judo, Aikido and Karate.

Moving away to Medical School in Manchester at the age of 18 and then, what was at that time the fairly standard 100+ hours a week work pattern of a junior doctor created a 10 year hiatus in martial art training. But in the late 70’s while working at a military hospital in the Middle-east Dave met up and trained with a group of what would probably now be called mixed martial artists who practised multi-discipline self defence, all  with a major interest in karate and of several styles, including Shotokan and Kyokushinkai,  which renewed the interest. On returning to the U.K. in 1981, he joined Steve Arneil’s British Karate Kyokushinkai, training in Cardiff until the fragmentation, mainly for political reasons, of the BKK.  As a consequence of the demise of the Kyokushinkai club that he had trained with for almost 10 years there was a need for a small change of direction, he had observed a local Jutsu Kai club, performing the style developed by Bernard Creton. That style’s similarity of technique, direction and method to that which he had trained previously persuaded him to join in 1991. He has been with that same club ever since and was their chief instructor from 2003 - 2015. In 2015 Dave took over the role of president and handed the chief instructor position to Roger Nevens 5th Dan.