ACKFORD . . . Bickle . . . Gawman . . . Harvey . . . we walk past them with barely a glance. The 119 names on Tavistock?s war memorial are only brought into sharp focus each Remembrance Day.
But each name hewn into the granite hides a life. Sometimes of hardship, sometimes of happiness, sometimes of glorious normality.
Now, local historians Alex Mettler and Gerry Woodcock have unearthed the human lives beneath the granite names.
Their book, We Will Remember Them, details the family histories and movements of the men who would be united on a memorial.
They include the expected casualties of the Great War. Twenty-two-year-old Lt Hugh Mockler-Ferryman was the first from the town to die in the war, on September 16 1914 in action at the Aisne; Ernest Davey, aged 36, was killed on that dreadful day, July 1 1916, within minutes of the start of the Battle of the Somme, and Charles Philp, aged 32, of Whitchurch, was killed in France in August 1916. ?One of the best,? read the death notice in the Tavistock Gazette.
There are many sailors, too, and those who died far from Ypres or Loos.
Cecil Merrifield, 22, a member of an old Tavistock family, enlisted in the Royal Navy two weeks after his 16th birthday and died in May 1916 when HMS Defence was sunk at Jutland Bank.
James Harris, 34, died in the appalling conditions in Kut, Iraq, where 12,000 men were captured by the Turks, in June 1916. He is buried in another centre of modern conflict: Baghdad.
But not every casualty of war falls to bullet or shell. Henry Pengelly, 23, died on the front in 1917 from injuries received when a dug-out collapsed on him.
?You must realise your boy has died for his country every bit as much as though he had been struck by a bullet,? his officer wrote to his grieving mother.
Shoppers will continue to walk past the war memorial with, understandably, barely a second glance and thought of those inscribed on it.
But by meticulous and detailed research, Mettler and Woodcock have ensured not only that the 119 names shall live for evermore, so will their lives ? and their tragic deaths.
l We Will Remember Them by Alex Mettler and Gerry Woodock, price £14.95, is available from local bookshops, Tavistock Museum or from Alex Mettler, Landfall, Courtenay Road, Tavistock, PLI9 OEE.
The authors will be signing copies of the book at Bookstop in Tavistock tomorrow (Friday) between 10am and noon.
COLIN BRENT