There are 51 names on the roll of honour. I can find out nothing about a few of them – there are for example 89 J Cookes listed on the Commonwealth War Graves website. There are many for whom I’ve had to make logical deductions about part or all of their history. But we can tell a little story about a goodly number of the names, and that’s what this memoir is about. Some of the stories that emerge are emotionally testing - there are three sets of brothers whose names appear in the list of the fallen; there are next door neighbours; there are fathers of young children; many of the men have no known grave; and they were all young men with a lifetime before them.

As you read these mini biographies, you might like to keep in mind the words of Siegfried Sassoon:

At dawn the ridge emerges massed and dun

In wild purple of the glowering sun

Smouldering through spouts of drifting smoke, that shroud

The menacing scarred slope; and, one by one,

Tanks creep and topple to the wire

The barrage roars and lifts. Then, clumsily bowed

With bombs and guns and shovels and battle gear,

Men jostle and climb to meet the bristling fire.

Lines of grey, muttering faces, masked with fear,

They leave their trenches, going over the top,

While time ticks blank and busy on their wrists,

And hope, with furtive eyes and grappling fists,

Flounders in mud. O, Jesus, make it stop.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Sources for the detail in this memoir include www.ancestry.co.uk, www.cwgc.org.uk, the Wakefield Express, and an unnamed member of Wakefield Family History Society who indexed the Wakefield Express for WW1 war deaths. I should like to say a special thanks to Ms Carol Sklinar of Wakefield Family History Society who read an early draft of this memoir and offered many helpful comments and filled in a number of gaps. All errors that remain are mine alone.

Brian Webb, Autumn 2009.