Fourth Engineer Officer Harry Griffith Jones, S.S. Manchester Merchant (Manchester) – lost in the Battle of the Atlantic

Harry Griffith Jones was born in Pentraeth, Anglesey, on 15 December 1913, and baptised there five weeks later, the son of Harry Ogburn Jones and his wife Mary. The wider Jones family were long established a few miles away in Holyhead, where three generations of Harry's forebears had worked as blacksmiths, stonemasons and railway clerks in the town that grew up around the great Irish mail port.

Harry went to sea as a marine engineer while still in his teens. His service papers record that he had been discharged from an earlier ship named Durham — almost certainly the Federal Steam Navigation Company's cadet training ship MV Durham, built in 1934 for the England-New Zealand frozen meat trade — before he registered as a Second Class engineer at the Mercantile Marine Office in Glasgow on 21 August 1935: a career that had begun years before Britain went to war. His rating was Second Refrigerating Engineer, responsible for the machinery that kept a cargo ship's perishable cargo cold on the long Atlantic crossings, a skill he had likely first learned aboard that same refrigerated meat ship.

His service papers also record a narrower escape years before his last voyage: his original discharge book was reported lost through enemy action on 3 May 1941, and the Mercantile Marine authorities issued him a renewal, free of charge, so that he could carry on going to sea. By 1943 he had risen to Fourth Engineer Officer, serving aboard the SS Manchester Merchant, a 7,264-ton cargo steamer of the Manchester Liners fleet. No photograph of Harry is known to survive, but his service record describes him: 5 feet 9 inches tall, with grey eyes, brown hair and a fresh complexion.

In February 1943 the Manchester Merchant was one of sixty-three ships in Convoy ON 166, outbound from Liverpool for North America. The convoy ran into one of the heaviest and most prolonged U-boat actions of the entire Battle of the Atlantic: over five days a wolfpack of German submarines pressed home a running attack that cost the convoy fourteen ships. I

n the early hours of 25 February 1943, some 400 miles south-east of Cape Race, Newfoundland, the Manchester Merchant was struck by two torpedoes from the German submarine U-628. She sank in about ninety seconds.

Of the sixty-seven men aboard, thirty-six were lost, Harry Griffith Jones among them. He was thirty years old.

Harry has no grave but the sea.

His incomplete discharge card, in a handwritten note, says, "presumed drowned 25.2.1943".

He is commemorated on the Tower Hill Memorial in London, which honours the men and women of the Merchant Navy and Fishing Fleets who died in the two World Wars and have no known grave, and on the war memorial in Holyhead, the town his family called home. His own father, Harry Ogburn Jones, had died the previous decade and so did not live to learn of his son's loss.

Harry Griffith Jones was one of many thousands of merchant seamen who kept Britain fed, fuelled and armed through the most dangerous years of the Second World War, and who paid for it with their lives on a battlefield with no front line but the ocean itself.

This story is submitted by a descendant of his family, three generations on, so that his name and his service are not forgotten.