|
Date: |
|
Description: | Photocopy (39pp) of an ms account written for his two young daughters in September 1943 while he was a prisoner of war in Argyle Street camp, Hong Kong describing his childhood in Hampshire (1901 – 1916), his apprenticeship and training as an engineer in the RN Dockyard Portsmouth (1916 – 1919) and the Royal Naval College Greenwich (1920 – 1923), his service as a civilian electrical engineer attached to the battleships HMS RESOLUTION and HMS REVENGE in Home waters and the Mediterranean (1924 – 1926) and his appointments as the Assistant Electrical Engineer in the RN Dockyard, Trincomalee, Ceylon (1927 – 1931), at the Admiralty Engineering Laboratory in Middlesex (1931 – 1933), as a principal overseer in Birmingham (1933 – 1934), in the Directorate of Electrical Engineering at the Admiralty (1934 – 1937) and as the Superintending Electrical Engineer in the RN Dockyard, Hong Kong (1937 – December 1941), with much detail about their family life after his marriage in 1924, good descriptions of King George VI’s coronation in London in 1937, the major Hong Kong typhoon in September 1937 and the hurried and poorly organised evacuation of his wife and children from Hong Kong to the Philippines on board the EMPRESS OF JAPAN in July 1940 as the threat of war in the Far East increased, his own aborted evacuation from Hong Kong just before the outbreak of war in December 1941, a short but vivid impression of the three week campaign fought ‘without hope of success’ and a more detailed day-by-day record of the progress of the battle for Hong Kong during which, as the Commanding Officer of the Dockyard Defence Corps, he witnessed the gradual destruction of all the Dockyard’s defences by Japanese shelling and bombing, the garrison’s denial of any remaining working equipment on the morning of Christmas Day 1941 and their surrender in the afternoon; together with copies (1p each) of a diagram of Shamshuipo prisoner of war camp, an account of the celebration of Christmas Day in Argyle Street camp in 1942 and a poem about the burial of prisoners who had died in Shamshuipo camp.
Cataloguer RWAS | Publisher: | http://www.iwm.org.uk | Source: | Imperial War Museum | Creator: | Manning, Charles Joseph | Identifier: | http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/o... | Go to resource |
|
|