Jonathan Evans
The father at the heart of A Son Never Forgets
By Jason Evans
My Dad, Jonathan Evans, was born on 26 May 1962.
He lived with the haemophilia A bleeding disorder, a condition that prevents the blood from clotting properly. From childhood, he was given Factor VIII blood products which infected him with HIV and Hepatitis C.
Dad died on 8 October 1993. He was thirty-one years old. I was four.
For much of my childhood, the explanation for my father’s death was as brutally simple as can be put to a child: he was in heaven now.
I knew very little about what had actually happened. AIDS was spoken about through fear, stigma and cruel jokes. It was not something people explained to children, and it was rarely discussed openly. I did not understand why my dad had become infected or how treatment for haemophilia could have caused his death.
As I grew older, I learned more but the unanswered questions became harder to ignore.
Who had supplied the blood products? What had doctors, pharmaceutical companies and government departments known about the risks? When had they known it? Why had dangerous products continued to be used? Why had families like mine been told so little?
Those questions eventually became a search through medical records, government files, scientific papers and documents scattered across different archives. What began as an attempt to understand one death led me to evidence belonging to a much larger national scandal.
One life among thousands
Jonathan’s story was personal, but it was not unique.
He belonged to a generation of people with haemophilia who were infected with HIV, hepatitis viruses or both through NHS treatment. Many died young. Families lost sons, brothers, partners and fathers. Children grew up with photographs, fragments of memory and questions that nobody in authority seemed willing to answer.
The scale of the infected blood scandal can make individual lives disappear into statistics. Jonathan was one of those statistics, but he was also a person whose life should have continued far beyond the age of thirty-one.
Recording his name matters because this scandal was not simply a failure of policy or regulation. It happened to real people. It shortened lives, broke families apart and left consequences that continue across generations.
A son never forgets
My campaign began with the need to understand what had happened to my father.
It eventually grew into years of investigation, Freedom of Information requests, journalism, litigation and campaigning. That work helped uncover evidence, challenge the official account of the infected blood scandal and secure the public inquiry that victims and families had been denied for decades.
But beneath every document, court case and political argument was the same simple fact: my father died when I was four, and I wanted to know why.
A Son Never Forgets tells the full story of that search, the secrets it exposed and the campaign that followed.
Jonathan Evans
26 May 1962 to 8 October 1993