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Description: | An incomplete ms diary (28pp) for November 1915 – March 1916 (the entries for 11 – 14 November and 23 November – 4 December are missing), written by a Sub Lieutenant RNR serving as the 2nd Officer in the armed boarding steamer HMS TARA describing how, after the ship was torpedoed by the German submarine U 35 off Sollum on the North African coast on 5 November 1915, the surviving members of the crew became prisoners of war in the hands of the Turks and the Senussi and were marched to a camp at Bir Hakim in the Libyan desert where they suffered appalling privations, notably a starvation diet and totally inadequate clothing, footwear and medical attention until they were liberated by a column of British armoured cars under the Duke of Westminster on 17 March 1916; together with a later edited and expanded ms transcript (53pp) including the missing entries and details of all the casualties among the crew, four ms letters (1p each) dated November 1915 – January 1916 to his family in Holyhead, Anglesey written during his captivity expressing his hopes for his early release, two ms letters (6pp and 2pp) and a telegram sent to his family in March 1916 from a military hospital in Alexandria following his liberation giving a resume of his experiences, some ms and ts correspondence, circa 1922 – April 1930, between him and the Board of Trade and others concerning his claims for compensation for the permanent damage caused to his health principally by his hardships in captivity, three ts letters (1p each), January – February 1938, concerning a London Midland and Scottish Railway Company press release (5pp ts) on the occasion of his retirement recalling his wartime experiences, his official certificate of discharge from HMS TARA (May 1916), a permit book issued to him by the Dover police office (January 1918), a pass allowing him to proceed ashore in Calais from HMS SCOTIA (November 1918), two undated wartime press cuttings from an Anglesey newspaper about the loss of TARA and the hospital ship ANGLIA and a cutting about Griffiths’ death in the 1950s, photocopies of articles about the experiences of the TARA survivors published in three magazines – ‘Pearson’s’ (July), ‘The London’ (August) and ‘Wide World’ (December) – during 1916, the catalogue for an exhibition on HMS TARA held in Holyhead in 1976 and five photographs of the spoon and glass used by him during his period of captivity.
Cataloguer RWAS | Publisher: | http://www.iwm.org.uk | Source: | Imperial War Museum | Creator: | Griffiths, William Thomas | Identifier: | http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/o... | Go to resource |
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