TALK of 100 years since the Battle of the Somme has brought back old memories for one Worcester woman.

Valerie Hales said footage of HMHS Britannic during coverage of World War One for the centenary reminded her that her father Frank Clarke was aboard the boat when it sank in 1916.

The hospital ship - a sister ship of the Titanic - sank in the Aegean after an explosion caused by an underwater mine, killing 30 of the 1,065 people on board.

Mrs Hales said: "He joined up in the Warwickshire regiment and he went to France and he contracted Typhoid.

"He stayed in France at the hospital until he was better so they put him in the medical corps.

"He was on that ship.

"My father always thought it was a torpedo but apparently it was a mine."

Mrs Hales, of Scafell Close, said her father had told her the story of the ship's demise and of a friend who had lost his life.

She said: "When he was in Greece, he and his friend used to buy the cameo brooches.

"They were very cheap over there.

"They would buy there over there and sell them for a profit.

"They were told to make their way up on deck.

"My father and his friend did.

"Sadly his friend said, 'I'm going back down to get the cameos.'

"He went back down and the Captain pushed the button and sealed the (watertight) doors and he couldn't get back."

Although she heard that story, Mrs Hales said her father generally never talked about the war.

She said: "If he did start talking about the war my mother used to shut him up. It's what they did then.

"Now I would have loved to have known more."