大象传媒

Cheltenham's borough war memorial is a familiar landmark to Graham Sacker.

He grew up in the town and for years as he walked up the Prom his eyes were drawn to the hundreds of names inscribed on the memorial in the garden fronting the council offices.

Finally, in the early 1990s, Graham decided to find out what he could about the men behind the names.

But he was dismayed to discover, when he visited the public library, that almost nothing was known about any of the men of Cheltenham who gave their lives for King and country. So Graham decided to find out their stories and preserve them for posterity.

Poignant record

He was joined in his quest by Joe Devereux, who felt similarly passionately that Cheltenham's Great War dead should be properly remembered.

The project was to take five years. And the result - completed through hours of painstaking digging through dusty archives (this was well before the era of online history research) - was Leaving All That Was Dear, a poignant record of nearly 1600 men from the town who died in the Great War.

Amazingly in these days when family history research is one of Britain's most popular hobbies, no publisher was interested in taking on the project, so Graham and Joe were forced to fund the printing themselves.

"We paid to have 500 copies printed, which was the absolute maximum we could afford - and thought we could sell," recalls Graham.

In fact the book was a sell-out, and today the few copies held in Gloucestershire libraries are in high demand among family history researchers.

Pilgrimages

The stories also feature on a local website, remembering.org.uk, created by ex-Army brothers Dave and Jimmy James, whose great uncle, Charles Herbert William Pearce, was killed in action in Mesopotamia in February 1917 serving with 7th Battalion Gloucestershire Regiment.

But Graham wasn't satisfied with simply getting Cheltenham's war dead into print.

Since the book was published in 1997 he's made pilgrimages to hundreds of their graves and memorials, as far away as Gallipoli in Turkey.

And at each he's left a poppy cross - for some the first time anyone from their hometown has made a personal visit to pay tribute to their sacrifice.

Graham says: "They were our boys and we were very pleased to be able to do this project so their names will never be forgotten. It's extremely important that we remember their sacrifice.

"They're not just names, they're actual people, and they deserved to be remembered."