J C Tait

Photocopy (81pp) of a well-written ms diary kept during his service with the 10th Battalion East Yorkshire Regiment (92nd Brigade, 31st Division) at Suez in Egypt, November 1915 - February 1916, and on the Somme in France, March - June 1916, describing Army life in Egypt, praising the local ASC canteen and the Battalion Chaplain, the Reverend R M Kedward, and referring to his anticipation at transferring to the Western Front and the trench conditions which greeted them, bayonet training and physical drill, the tranquillity of the French countryside behind the lines, and the prolonged German bombardment suffered by the Battalion in early June. Shortly before the opening of the Somme offensive, Tait was discharged from the Army due to misstatement of his age upon enlisting: he remained some months short of his seventeenth birthday. Appended to the diary are some later articles by Tait describing his childhood and First World War service.

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