Valentine Harland
merchant seaman
People called him 'Val'.
He was an ordinary seaman (Able Seaman
was the term used then) in the Merchant Navy, during the Second World War. He was captured by the Japanese aboard the SS BENNEVIS and died in a POW camp
My grandmother, his aunt, kept his pictures, his pay book and seaman's union card and telgrams fom the war office in the sandalwood box he brought her back from Singapore.
She used to show me these pictures and tell me stories about him.
