Howard-Jones was born in Lambourn, Berkshire, in 1903. Her father was a vet and racehouse trainer who enlisted in the Royal Army Veterinary Corps during World War I. He served on the Western Front rising to the rank of Colonel but died in 1921 from the effects of a war-time gas attack. Both her parents were Welsh and at the age of two Ray Howard-Jones went to live at her grandfather's house in Penarth. Howard-Jones attended St.Hilda's School in Penarth and then the London Garden School. In 1920 she went to the Slade School of Art in London, graduating four years later with a Fine Art Diploma that included distinctions in painting, wood engraving and design. She won the Slades summer composition prize for her oil painting Christ on the Road to Calvary. As a student Howard-Jones created a mural for the headquarters of the Student Christian Movement in Gower Street near the Slade. She held her first solo exhibition in 1935 at the Bloomsbury Gallery in London but her art career was interrupted by bad health, first with recurring back pains and later a bout of tuberculosis. For a time she worked in a lamp factory, painting designs on lamp shades. She returned to live in Penarth, to organise her grandparents substantial household and arrange their nursing care. In Cardiff Howard-Jones went to work for the National Museum of Wales, providing drawings of archaeological reconstructions for the published works of Sir Cyril Fox and Dr Nash-Williams.
