The first 20

This is a clickable list of my posts.  Please don't try to make sense of the order I am doing them in - it started out as alphabetical, then went to chronological, then to people buried in the local cemetery and finally to the 80th anniversary of D-Day and the fighting in Normandy.

Kenneth Grant was a cook in the army, died being flown to hospital in Sicily in 1944

George Hercus fought through North Africa and was killed fighting with the Black Watch a few days after D-Day

Robert Carnochan was a navigator in the Merchant Navy and died in an accident shortly after landing troops in Sicily in 1943

Charles Macdonald died in a sadly typical 1915 attack where his company had to run at the Germans across 300 yards of open ground

John Douglas, a cashier, joined up within weeks of the start of WW1, but during training with his battalion, he contracted TB and came home to die.

John Young was an engineer who travelled the world but came home in 1914 to do war work before joining the Royal Flying Corps and dying when his plane crashed during training.

William Goodall, motor van driver before the war, joined the Royal Artillery and was fighting his way up Italy in 1944 when he was killed.

John Chalmers, commercial traveller for a wool merchant, came home in 1914 to join up and was killed as a junior officer attacking with his battalion on the first day of the Battle of the Somme in 1916.

Sam Shearman, left home young to join the Royal Navy and travelled the world in his brief life, which ended when a submarine sank his ship within weeks of the start of WW1.

Daniel Walker, a gardener in peacetime, killed fighting with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders at Ypres in 1915

Sophia Edward, the only woman on the memorial, died when the ship brining her home to England in 1939 was torpedoed in the bay of Biscay

David Edward, the only other civilian named and Sophia's brother, died six months after her - he helped designed new aircraft and was killed on a test flight which crashed.

John Duvoisin, works manager at a factory owned by his father, joined up and fought through 1915, seriously wounded but recovered in time for The Somme where he was killed in mid-July 1916.

Herbert Adams, from a golfing family, joined the RAF in 1939 and was killed when a bomber he was transferring from Egypt to Malta disappeared in the Mediterranean.

William Buchanan, mercantile clerk working in what would become Princes Square in Glasgow, died in an attack by his battalion over open group at Gallipoli in 1915.

Douglas Alexander, seems to have joined up almost straight from school in 19139 and fought in a tank regiment in North Africa.  Killed on D-Day within a few hours of landing.

James Kilroy, golf professional at Douglas Park, killed when the plane on which he was the bomb-aimer crashed in the Adriatic on the way back from a mission in 1945.

William Brockhill, manager of a bank branch at Westerton, died 48 hours after D-Day when the ship carrying him to Normandy was hit by a torpedo.

Thomas Blythe, commercical representative for a steel company, died commanding a company of infantry during their first attack in Normandy in July 1944.

Peter Stanbury Salmond, a Black Watch officer, killed in his battalion's first action in Normandy.