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Roll of honour for war dead goes on display
Lucy Harvey A ROLL of honour listing personal details of 1,304 railway men who died in the First World War will go on display in Sheffield today.
The men, who all worked for the Great Central Railway Company (GCRC), have already been honoured by a war memorial outside the Holiday Inn Royal Victoria, the former site of Sheffield's Victoria Station.
Since that memorial was unveiled three years ago, members of the Great Central Railway Society have worked to research and record personal details of the men, including where they came from, where they lived, their regiment and the circumstances of their deaths.
They have discovered the victims included a 15-year-old boy, an Italian and a German.
At a ceremony today the society will present bound copies of the record to the hotel for display in the hotel's reception area.
Representatives from the Imperial War Museum, York Railway Museum and the Sheffield local history library will also be given copies at the event.
Society member Ken Grainger, who carried most of the research, said: "The network stretched from London right up to Sheffield, west to Manchester and east to north Lincolnshire and Grimsby so men from across that area worked for the company.
"The oldest gentlemen we found was Bill Prior who died in his late 60s while in the Royal Defence Core. The youngest was Charles Larson at just 15 years old who was on the SS Leicester ship which was on Royal Naval Service when it was brought down in the Channel.
"Another interesting fact that we discovered is that more of the men were killed on 1 July 1916, the first day of the Somme, than any other. On that day the Sheffield City Battalion were involved in the battle of Serre, the Grimsby Chums were at La Boisselle and the Manchester's at Montauban – all suffered dreadful losses.
"The Italian gentleman, Angelo Fantozzi, came over to Sheffield as a child but when Italy joined the war in 1915 he went back to his homeland to join the army there.
"Strangely, we also found a German man, Gerhard Brumund, who was living in Grimsby but was a member of the kitchen staff also on the SS Leicester ship."
Hermann Beck, co-owner and general manager of the Holiday Inn Royal Victoria, said: "We are privileged to be holding this ceremony at the hotel and delighted that we will have a document which gives details of all those men on the memorial."
Lucy.Harvey@ypn.co.uk
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Saturday 26 May 2012
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