Meo, Innes

"incidents during the great Thiepval battle", fragmentary notes ("...assembly trenches full of Lancs dead. a corporal refusing to walk any longer on dead attempts to climb out of trench & his head is split in two by a piece of shell...") in pencil, 2 pages, 8vo, [September 1916], folded, worn; Field Message Book, with notes, orders, and c.7 sketches, including French landscapes (one showing the position of a sniper) and wounded soldiers, graph paper with perforated edge, oblong 8vo, 126 numbered pages (including blanks), July 1916; three leaves from a message book containing five pencil sketches of trench warfare, including dead soldiers and an execution, graph paper, 8vo, [?1916]; sketch map of a railway line, 8 August 1916; two carbon-copy orders and reports, annotated by Meo, 7 pages, 1915-16; Field Service Pocket Book. 1916, 8vo, ownership inscription of Innes Meo, brown cloth, with three PoW ration cards in German loosely inserted; Trench Map, France Sheet 57 SW [Somme Region], reinforced folding map, correct at 3 September 1916; four photographs, including a soldier in a gas mask playing the accordion (with a name and address on the reverse), and British officers at Pforzheim (presumably the Prisoner of War Camp); fragment of fabric from a Zeppelin shot down in August 1914; two documents relating to Meo's discharge, 1919-21

Luigi Alfonso Rocco ("Gigi") Innes Meo (1886-1967) was an London-based painter who enlisted in the Artists' Rifles in April 1915 and was sent to France the following year in the 11st Battalion Royal Sussex Regiment. He experienced the Front at the Battle of the Somme in September 1916. His harrowing diary of his weeks at the front and subsequent breakdown from "shell shock" is held by the Imperial War Museum (IWM DOCS/79/3/1). He nonetheless returned to the front and was captured by the Germans during the Spring Offensive of 1918. After the war he became an art teacher at Bedales School.