THE FRIENDS of St Augustine’s Church have been looking at the Penarth Times for this week's This Day in History diary entry from 1915, which was full of articles on the naval exploits of young men from Penarth.

A naval battle (later to be called the “Battle of Dogger Bank”) had taken place in the North Sea the Sunday before. The contribution of two Penarth men to that battle was described, as was Penarth's participation in three other previous sea battles.

Christopher Shepherd, a former farm hand at Cornerswell Farm, and the son of Henry Shepherd of Ludlow Street, was a leading stoker on HMS Lion (the flagship), and Albert E. King, son of James King, a Taff Vale Railway driver living in Windsor Road, Cogan, was a stoker on HMS New Zealand. Both ships had taken part in the Battle of Heligoland Bight on August 28, 1914, and now this most recent battle. Britain had been victorious in both battles.

A third article, of great interest, described another Cogan man’s exploits in the South Pacific and South Atlantic, at the Battles of Coronel and the Falkland Islands. This was H. Allen, of Cawnpore Road (a former member of the Penarth Stars Football Club), who was an artificer (gunnery engineer) on the battleship HMS Canopus. Allen himself gave a vivid first-hand account of the two battles. At Coronel, off the coast of Chile, Admiral Graf Spee’s East Asia Fleet, which was attempting to get back to Germany via the Cape Horn, decisively defeated on November 1 an outnumbered and outgunned British Fleet.

Britain sent reinforcements to the South Atlantic, and on December 8 Spee, putting in to the Falkland Islands for provisions, was surprised by a vastly superior British force. As Allen puts it: “The Germans were completely spellbound at our appearance… After a few hours of a desperate nature, our fleet had the pleasure of sinking four of their battleships. Our casualties were very few, but on the German side they lost thousands. We had six killed and several wounded.” We now know that Admiral Graf Spee and his two sons were among the dead.

This paper contained another vivid first-hand account, this time of the experience of the trenches, recounted by Frank Pope of Cogan Hall Farm. In a letter to a friend Pope described the miserable, wet conditions, adding whimsically: “So you can see that we must feel very happy and comfortable here, especially with the ague to buck me up.” Christmas and New Year brought, here as elsewhere, friendly communications with the Germans: “We were exchanging greetings with the Germans on Xmas morning, and at midnight New Year’s Eve we could hear them singing and cheering… We are only 300 yards from them, and at 12 o’clock we started as well. We were singing to them, and they to us… The Germans have “Tipperary” off a treat. Then it was finished up with singing the old year out and the new year in, but instead of bells we used our rifles and they used theirs; and thus ended the fighting of 1914.”