1914-15 Star (205226 A.H. JAMES. L.S. R.N.); British War Medal (205526 A.H. JAMES. L.S. R.N.); Victory Medal (205226 A.H. JAMES. L.S. R.N.)
Arthur Harry James was born in Sandown on the Isle of Wight in 1883. He joined the RN as a Boy in 1899 and then served from 1901. He transferred to the Royal Fleet Reserve in July 1913 and drowned whilst aboard HMS Viknor when she sank off the Irish Coast on 13.1.1915. Though the exact cause of the Viknor’s loss cannot be established with certainty, it is possible that she struck a German mine. This could possibly have been one of the 200 laid in the same general area by the German auxiliary cruiser Berlin, one of which had sunk the British super-dreadnought HMS Audacious on October 27th 1914.
Near the end of 1914, she was requisitioned for the war effort, converted into an armed merchant cruiser and renamed HMS Viknor. She was allocated to the Royal Navy’s 10th Cruiser Squadron and tasked with patrolling between Iceland and Northern Scotland.
In early 1915 the Viknor was part of a patrol who had been ordered to find and stop the neutral ship Bergensfjord which was suspected of carrying a German spy. The Viknor found the ship and detained and escorted her to Kirkwall in Orkney. The suspected spy and a number of prisoners were transferred to the Viknor and they then set off for Liverpool. But the Viknor never made it.
On the 13th of January close to Tory Island, the ship was lost in heavy weather. She never sent a distress signal and it was assumed she was sunk by a German naval mine but that has never been confirmed. In the days following the sinking, many of the bodies and part of the wreck washed up on shore.
The HMS Viknor and her crew were some of earliest casualties in the Great War.
Sold with some research
