Exactly 100 years ago, a school teacher from Cardiff travelled to Berlin for the summer holidays, where he planned to stay for four weeks.
But when World War One broke out 10 days after his arrival, Thomas Wyndham Richards was rounded up alongside thousands of other British civilians and marched to a German detention camp.
The 23-year-old, who taught in Marlborough School, ended up spending four years in the Ruhleben detention camp and kept detailed diaries of his experiences.
Exactly 100 years after his father travelled to Germany, Derek Richards has published his diaries to mark the centenary of the conflict.
Speaking at the book launch at the Cardiff Story museum, he said: “If my father knew, I think he would be astonished, but I hope he would be pleased.”
Derek found his father’s diaries when his mother died in 1980, but it was only when he became interested in family history 20 years later that he started trying to decipher the 100,000 words of spidery handwriting – some of which was written in German manuscript.
He said: “The diaries are not easy to read, because much of the writing is extremely small, some is in pencil and has faded, some is written using old German lettering and much is written in modern German.
“Some, regrettably, is totally illegible and some, though clear, is totally incomprehensible.”
After years of painstaking work, Derek has edited the diaries and published them as a book called Wyndham’s War.
The 85-year-old, from Newport, said: “It was astonishing. The war broke out 10 days after he got there. He thought he would be allowed home, but he was not.”
On August 10, 1914, Thomas Wyndham Richards wrote in his diary: “Heard we must stay till the end of the war. All very down about it.”
The teacher was told to report to the nearest police station and had to attend regularly for the next two months, until he was arrested and taken to a civilian detention camp along with 4,000 other male British citizens, who had been studying, working or holidaying in Germany.
But German forces were overwhelmed by the number of civilian detainees and, due to a lack of prisons, were forced to create a makeshift internment camp in Ruhleben – an old manor house, six miles west of Berlin.
The camp, which was surrounded by barbed wire, was originally a horse racing track, built in 1908.
Derek said: “When my father arrived, there was nothing there apart from straw. They slept in old stables, with 300 of them packed into each stable building and hay loft.”
Despite the primitive conditions and scarcity of food, the German authorities adhered to the Geneva Convention and allowed the detainees to administer their own affairs. Gradually, a mini-society evolved in the camp.
Letters, books, sports equipment and a printing press were all allowed into Ruhleben and the detainees organised their own police force, magazine, library and post service, where Mr Richards worked for two-and-a-half years.
He was eventually released in November 1918, two weeks after the war ended. He returned to South Wales, where he continued to teach and married fellow school teacher Jessie James – his “sweetheart” from before the war, who he feared may be engaged to someone else.
During World War Two, his language skills were called upon by the police and he acted as an interpreter. He died aged 75 in March 1966.
To order a copy of Wyndham’s War, email Derek Richards on email@example.com