Visually fascinating photographic diary written by an officer with the Royal Army Ordnance Corps who - against all rules - took a camera to the front which allowed him to record the Battle of El Alamein (1942) as well as the chaotic British evacuation from St Nazaire (1940) from where he offers an eye witness account of the sinking of HMS Lancastria with the loss of 3500 lives. Pritchard who lived in Blackpool, Lancashire, makes clear in his diary that contemporary press reports were wholly inaccurate in the way that they described this catastrophic loss. The young officer, as he became, emerges from the manuscript as an ebullient and rambunctious character and the flip side of this diary describes - and pictures - his partying, performance-giving and bed-hopping during the first two years of the war. A feature of the diary is Pritchard’s insertion of dozens of pieces of ephemera and c200 small format photographs. His diary ends abruptly after his photographs of the Christmas dinner enjoyed in the aftermath of El Alamein in the north African desert in 1942.
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: The Romney Notebook; ownership signature of ‘Pritchard, 217 Talbot Road, Blackpool’ to front flyleaf. Lined paper, paginated from pp1-165 where it stops in media res; followed by c40 blanks. Around 200 photographs tipped in and ephemera including ‘Certified copy of Attestation’, roneod programmes from a billet in Le Havre - Pritchard presenting ‘Monologues’ and a repeat on Christmas Day; letters about his promotion to Corporal; a few photos missing but a very good manuscript.
THE STORY: Pritchard’s Diary begins on September 3rd, 1939, ‘When war was declared on Sunday morning, Sept 3rd 1939, I was listening to the wireless. Now why didn’t I think at the time to take a good dramatic picture of myself?’ Shortly afterwards he volunteered for service and embarked for France in November 1939. The phoney war allowed Pritchard to take part in a series of carefully documented performances in Le Havre, with programmes interspersed with further ephemera: ‘Heaven knows why I kept this ticket on the Metro - (Paris Underground)’.
Thence he moved on to Nantes ‘I’d bought an “ELJY’ camera the day I left’, offering pictures of Nissen huts, Sunday bicycle road races and then the chaotic ‘Evacuation’ towards St Nazaire: ‘we were dive bombed and machine gunned a little. That night, we were machine gunned again as we slept in the open fields’ embarking along a road strewn with ‘discarded kitbags and souvenirs dropped by tired men who could carry just themselves and nothing more.’
Too late at St Nazaire to board the Lancastria ‘we pulled away, down came the dive-bombers, out of the eye of the Sun. The first bomb struck the ship forward, and the next - a lucky follow up - dropped down the funnel. In 15 minutes we saw the Lancastria break her back and sink... The papers said there was no panic. But a man who was saved told me that down below decks those who were trapped were shooting their way out’. Pritchard takes care to contradict the official newspapers reports - but tips in the newpaper cuttings even so.
Interviewed on the docks by a Blackpool journalist working for the News Chronicle on his return, Pritchard’s diary continues via Leicester where he caught scenes of flirtation at one of ‘Mrs Playfair’s parties’ at No 1 College Street and shared a bed with newly weds, moved to York for a Christmas concert in the Garrison Theatre (1940) before sailing for Cape Town, Port Elizabeth and Durban: ‘our voyage was hellish’, up the Red Sea, disembarking at Port Tawfik and a brief moment in Suez (pictured) before reconnoitring a route across the Western Desert (September 1942) where ‘strewn far and wide across the desert we found the wreckage of enemy planes shot down on their way to raid Cairo’ (pictured) before advancing into battle positions for El Alamein: ‘How the Brigade - indeed the whole Eighth Army - got right up to the enemy wire, without him knowing is a long and interesting story, to be told after the War. So here I leave two pages blank; to be completed after the war when it may be told’ - tellingly that narrative is not present.
Pritchard recounts the Battle of El Alamein from his perspective serving in the 24th Armoured Brigade Group (’under Brigadier A G Kenchington, a fine tried soldier’), fighting along ‘Mitiryeh Ridge & Wiskat Ridge, the objective being “Kidney” Ridge, about 15 mile West of Alamein’ - ‘On one occasion a bunch of yellow flares dropped 20 yards from my bivvy (we lived in shallow holes in the ground with bivouac tents as roof)... Each time I heard a screaming bomb I imagined it to be coming straight for me’ and finally breaking through to El Daba where Pritchard took pictures of the ‘enemy cemetery below’ with further pictures of casualties and ‘countless Germans and Italians lying dead like this.’
Capturing the aftermath of the battle Pritchard photographed German and Italian prisoners and there are scenes of gleeful sea bathing as well as the salvage of a ‘German Daily Order’, mounted in the album. Pritchard pictures the road to Mersa Matruh strewn with ruins and ‘wreckages like this. An ammunition train had exploded here’ before celebrating Christmas at Tel el Kebir, complete with a roneod Christmas menu tipped onto a page stub. The pictures of the Christmas meal end the album.
