Material relating to wireless telegrapher James Young while a prisoner of war in Germany during the First World War

Material relating to James Young, a wireless telegraphy operator with the Marconi company during the First World War. The folder includes his first class certificate of proficiency in radiotelegraphy issued by the Postmaster General in July 1913. The rest of the folder consists of postcards with photographic prints of Young and other Mercantile Marine officers held as prisoners of war in the city of Krefeld and in the Wahmbeck camp in Germany during the First World War.

Administrative / biographical background
James Young was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1887. He was the youngest of the three sons of James Young and Mary Ann Young née Laing. After leaving Berwick Grammar School he worked in the Laing family grocery business at Belford in Northumberland. He then trained in wireless telegraphy with the Marconi Company, gaining his certificate of proficiency in 1913. Young was then a wireless operator on merchant ships including the CARONIA (1905), GALICIA (1901), ELMINA ex ALBERTVILLE (1906) and the IRISHMAN (1899). He was employed on the cargo liner GEORGIC (1895) when this vessel was captured and scuttled by the German commerce raider MOEWE ex PUNGO (1914) off Newfoundland in December 1916. The officers of the GEORGIC spent the rest of the First World War as civilian prisoners in Germany, initially in the city of Krefeld and then in a rural location at Wahmbeck. Young married Ida Millican at Belford in 1919 and then worked as a grocer in the village. He died in 1968. His brother George William Young joined the Royal Navy as a stoker, but died of pneumonia at Portsmouth in 1917.