Early Life :

Family :

Education & Career :

Caterer (1905)

Service Life:

Campaigns:

• The First World War 1914-1918, World-wide.

Naval Campaign is defined as to include all sea operations where attrition rates are in ones and twos and which do not fall within specific naval battles such as Jutland, Coronel, Falklands etc. This includes Merchant Navy losses.

Detail :

ARDY, Henry John Alfred William, Cook, SS Oriole There is no reason to doubt that the General Steam Navigation Company's steamer Oriole (1,489 tons) met her fate also at the hands of German U Boat U20, but her end was mysterious. The Oriole left London for Le Havre on January 29th, and passed the S.S. London Trader off Dungeness on the afternoon of the following day. The distance from Dungeness to Le Havre being from ninety to ninety-five miles, the Oriole should have reached the latter port about ten o'clock that evening. She was never heard of again. Later in the year, Mr. Justice Bailhache had to decide in the High Court the fate of the vessel. In the course of his judgment, he told of two pathetic incidents. On February 6th, two lifebuoys were found on the coast between Hastings and Dymchurch, a little seaside place to the north of Dungeness. The name Oriole was painted upon them. In the following month on March 20th a Guernsey fisher man picked out of the sea an ordinary beer-bottle containing a piece of paper. On the bottle being broken, the paper was found to be an envelope embossed with the name of the General Steam Navigation Company, and written in pencil was the message, 'Oriole torpedoed sinking.' The widow of the ship's carpenter identified the handwriting as that of her husband. After considering all the evidence, Mr. Justice Bailhache came to the conclusion that the only reasonable explanation of the disappearance of the Oriole was that she was torpedoed by the enemy, the master (Mr. William G. Dale) and his crew of twenty men perishing. The story has an historical interest since, whereas the Glitra was the first vessel to be sunk by a submarine on October 20th, 1914 the Tokomaru and the Ikaria were the first to be torpedoed without warning, while the Oriole destroyed in the same barbarous way, was the first British loss which involved the death of the crew. Source: The merchant navy (Volume 1) - Hurd, Archibald, Sir

https://www.wrecksite.eu/wreck.aspx?13369

Awarded the Mercantile Marine Medal 1914-1918

Commemorated on the Tower Hill Memorial.

Masonic :

Initiated in 1905 and recorded as a Caterer, aged 33 and resident at 165 Southampton Street, Camberwell. The ledger shows that he "Died Feb 1915", with his dues in arrears for the period of the war.

Source :

The project globally acknowledges the following as sources of information for research across the whole database:

• The Commonwealth War Graves Commission
• The (UK) National Archives
• Ancestry.co.uk - Genealogy, Family Trees & Family History online
• ugle.org.uk - The records of the United Grand Lodge of England including the Library and Museum of Freemasonry

Additional Source:

• Founder Researchers : Paul Masters & Mike McCarthy
• Researcher : Bruce Littley