Bill and Elaine Harrison with their eight-month-old granddaughter Jessica.

Silhouettes from a war to remember

There are plenty of ways to pay respect to those lost in the First World War.

But there can’t be many villages where the parish council chairman and his wife have hand-made a Tommy for every man killed.

The dozen silhouettes can be found around the village and each has an individual’s name and details attached.

Bill Harrison said the parish council had been discussing ways of marking the 100th anniversary of the end of the war and the idea came-up.

“It was my wife’s idea really and she drew a Tommy on a sheet of old wallpaper. I used that to make the 12 men from wood and she painted them,” he said.

The silhouettes, which donations helped pay for, will be kept and Mr Harrison said he hoped to re-use them in coming years.

“We wanted to do something to mark the anniversary of the Armistice and this seems to be a nice way of doing it,” he added.

Among the locations chosen is the village hall, on the site of the old Institute Hall built in the 1920s and dedicated to the fallen.

The 12 as taken from the war memorial in the village church, are: Charles Edward Alcock, (28), East Yorkshire Regt; Henry Beecham, (34), 2nd Lincolnshire Regt; Harry Cragg, no age recorded, 6th Lincolnshire Regt; Thomas Parkinson Cracknell, 50th Canadian Infantry; C Sidney Earle, (19), 2nd Bedfordshire Regt; Francis William Farrow, (34), 1/4th Lincolnshire Regt; Frederick Heanes, (21), North Staffs Regt; William Red[d]in, (28), 2nd Suffolk Regt; Wilfred Templeton Samuels, (25), 47th Balloon Sect, RFC; Percival Hutchinson Samuels, (19), 3/4th Lincolnshire Regt; Thomas Spinks, (19), 7th Lincolnshire Regt and Harold Taylor, (21), 2/5th Lincolnshire Regt.

Leave a Reply