A Fitting Tribute to Halesworth’s War Heroes

Remembrance Day 2020 was marked by the Halesworth and District Museum with the online publication of the first of some 80 biographies of Halesworth-born men who died during the Great War. The project is the brainchild of  Alan Clapson of Chediston Street in Halesworth, a long-standing member of the Territorial Army and a regular attender of the Remembrance Day service in the town since he and his wife, Sue, arrived there in 2000. Listening to the roll-call of the fallen and realising that, behind each name there lay an individual life-story, the Clapsons set about the task of researching the lives of each of them.

It is a task which has taken them nearly two decades and has occupied many thousands of hours of study in books and online, in the local museum and at the National Archives.

Having worked from the beginning in collaboration with the Halesworth and District Museum, Alan saw the Museum’s website as the natural place for them to be accessible to everyone. Remembrance Day 2020 provided the occasion for the publication online of the first ten. Each is a poignant story of a life cut short.

 

Over the coming months the rest of these tributes will be made available. Wherever possible they are illustrated with photographs and, where they have survived, with letters and mementoes, patiently collected over the years by the Clapsons.

Readers can access the first of the stories on the website of the Halesworth and District Museum

http://halesworthmuseum.org.uk/wpress/men-of-halesworth-who-served-in-the-great-war/