When I was a child, my sister and I would sit with my grandmother while she told stories of her family and the dear brother that she lost in 1917. We had never heard of the First World War and it meant nothing to us. It has taken a very long time for me to understand the sacrifice that you made. My father, your nephew, fought in the Second World War and it was his story that his family knew. Now as we look back a century I know that it is right and proper that you are remembered. You came from a large happy family in Surrey. Your father was a successful iron merchant and your mother the daughter of a widow, living in Shoreham-by-Sea, who earned her living after the death of her husband by becoming a sempstress. Your father generously moved his wife's family to Sutton in Surrey to be near his wife. The Townshends can trace their roots back to a noble who crossed the Channel with William the Conqueror and were rewarded with land in Norfolk. So 850 years later you returned to France and died there in another war. Your left your savings to my grandmother who married a year later. No photograph of you survives and I know nothing of you, your personality, your education, your hopes and ambitions. But like hundreds of thousands of young men you did not live to be reunited with your family after the war, you did not live to have a family or meet the families of your siblings. I will ensure that you memory does not die and that those of us who live in peace remember the sacrifice that you made.

Elizabeth Ann Townshend Everett