My Inspiration For This Project

Sydney Metcalfe was my Grandad. He enlisted in his local Territorial battalion, the 5th Princess Alexandra's Own Yorkshire Regiment (Green Howards), in October 1914, despite only having got married in April that year, at the age of 19.

He was sent to France in the Summer of 1916, at which point he was posted to the 10th Yorkshire Regiment and fought with them on the Somme and at Arras. He was wounded three times during his service. His second wound, sustained in August 1917, near Arras, was bad enough for him to be sent home to England, where he was operated on for a serious leg wound. He recovered from the wound and the operation and was sent back out to France in May 1918. He was posted to the 7th East Kent Regiment with whom he fought during the final advance to victory in 1918 and in the Army of Occupation in Germany until his demobilisation in February 1919. He received his third wound (to his right hand) in late October 1918 and was recovering in hospital when the Armistice was signed on 11th November 1918.

Sydney did not speak about his war experiences often, but when he did so, most of his stories were funny anecdotes, which I suspect were intended to hide the grimmer realities of his experiences from those who never experienced them and could never really understand. But he did vividly remember the sheer horror and discomfort of life in the trenches in the Loos Sector between Vermelles and Hulluch during the bitter winter of 1916/17.

My Grandad's experience and stories fascinated me growing up and inspired a lasting interest in the First World War.

1. Lance Corporal Sydney Metcalfe (1896 - 1986)

2. A Poem By Siegfried Sassoon

On Passing The New Menin Gate

Who will remember, passing through this Gate,

The unheroic Dead who fed the guns?

Who shall absolve the foulness of their fate -

Those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones?

Crudely renewed, the Salient hold it's own,

Paid are its dim defenders by this pomp,

Paid, with a pile of peace-complacent stone,

The armies who endured that sullen swamp.

Here was the world's worst wound. And here with pride

'Their name liveth forever,' the Gateway claims,

Was ever an immolation so belied

As these intolerably nameless names?

Well might the Dead who struggled in the slime,

Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime."

Siegfried Sassoon wrote this poem after visiting the Menin Gate, the massive Memorial to The Missing at Ypres, in Belgium, which lists the names of over 55,000 British and Empire soldiers who were killed around Ypres between October 1914 and the night of 15/16 August 1917, and who have no known grave.

When I read this poem, I was struck, not just by the bitterness of the words, but also by the fact that these sentiments could equally be applied to our war memorials today. How many people who attend the annual Remembrance services, or who give the memorials a passing glance at other times of the year, really do know anything about the people listed on them?

Haven't even our own local heroes become "intolerably nameless names"?

The combination of the interest generated by talking to my Grandad and reading Sassoon's poem, made me determined to try to find out more about the names on my local War Memorials and to create a permanent record of their stories for others to read and share.

In the early-mid 1990s general internet use was in its infancy, but it was growing rapidly and it was clear that it could potentially have great advantages over traditional printed media, not least through its availability to a world-wide audience and the ability to easily update the information as more became available. Therefore, with a HTML manual in one hand and a keyboard in the other, I manually wrote and designed the original version of this website, which was first published in October 1996.

Since then, many other similar websites have been created and I have listed all the sites I have found in the links page. If you have developed a similar site, which is not included in the links page, please let me know the details and I will be happy to add it.