De Beauvoir residents joined together to remember the First World War with the opening of a memorial at St Peter’s Church last Sunday.
Local researchers found names and addresses for most of the 163 men who died, which they displayed on a map. There was also a display of pictures by pupils from Hackney New School.
Many families visited the memorial. Ismay Tims, 8, said she enjoyed “seeing where the people lived,” and found that one of the men came from her road.
Reverend Julia Porter said: “I’m delighted that members of the church and community have put all this research together to commemorate WWI in this way.”
Arthur King was the first of the De Beauvoir men to be killed, on 28 August 1914, two weeks after he was sent to the front. The last, Arthur Churchfield, died six days before Armistice Day.
Twenty-seven of the men were killed at the Somme, while others died further afield, in Turkey, Iraq and Palestine.
Kirsty Norman, chair of the De Beauvoir Association, said it was a way of re-humanising what can be an abstract subject.
“We all have these [WWI] memorials but we hardly look at them any more,” she said. “So we started to do the research to find out who these people were.”
