A studio portrait by D. C. Harries of a private in the Welsh Regiment with his family ca. 1916. Can anyone shed light on their identities?
Our local supermarket is now full of Christmas chocolate, a reminder that another year will soon draw to a close. 2013 will be followed by 2014 and with it the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War. Some decades ago the Library acquired thousands of glass negatives – the output of D. C. Harries, a commercial photographer for more than fifty years. These include numerous portraits of First World War soldiers, most presumably from Llandeilo and Ammanford where D. C. Harries maintained studios.
When these negatives arrived in the Library the memory of many of these men, either as fresh faced youths now in the corner of a foreign field, or as those who came back in 1918 to resume their lives would have been fresh in the minds of many inhabitants of those towns. Unfortunately time has robbed many of these photographs of their identities. Hopefully the centenary of the outbreak of the war will provide a platform for these photographs to be publicised and the identity of some of these anonymous young men to be re-discovered.
W. Troughton