Henry William Oliver . . . It's a name that none of us - your London-descendants through a younger brother, in fact, known to us and you as Joseph Benjamin - had even heard of until recently, when a little research into the family-tree yielded up the long-lost secret of your briefest of lives. From what we know, you can't have had the easiest of starts in this world. London's Bethnal Green in 1881 - the year of your birth - was by all accounts a tough, poverty-stricken environment. Your mother, Louisa Oliver, was by trade a street hawker, presumably selling goods to the general public on the capital's streets. Life must have been very precarious for all of you, because records show that you and your younger brother - yep, Joseph, again! - spent some of your childhood in a local children's home. You had several other siblings too: Lucy, Catherine, Thomas, Ellen, and Louisa. Unfortunately, we don't know a great deal about them. By the 19th of June 1904, however, you had married Elizabeth Chandler and by the time of your passing in 1916 you were living in Blackwall Buildings, off Whitechapel Road. What became of poor Elizabeth, we don't know. We imagine you might have been close with your brother, Joseph, because that's the same address where he continued to live himself for quite some time after your death. Perhaps - like him - you too had connections with Billingsgate Fish Market where he worked as a Fish Porter? Your brother was by all accounts a much loved man, and went on to have a good life by the standards of the day, although sadly - much like you - he lost his life in the Second World War, killed in a bomb-blast doing his job as a Firewatcher on Bateman's Row in Shoreditch. Apparently it was supposed to have been his night off. By writing up the few details of your life still known to us, and by honouring the bond you must have shared with your little brother, we hope to shed further light on the young soldier who not only gave his life in a famous world conflict, but who lived and was loved . . . and now won't be forgotten. REST IN PEACE, Henry . . . and thank you.

Andrew Hayes