Acknowledgements

As we started our work, Steve and Jenny Jarvis’s website on the Hampshire War Memorials and Jen Best and Tom Beaumont James’s work on the Winchester Debt of Honour project were crucial in providing basic information about most of the men who are the subject of this book. Tom’s excellent introduction to Debt of Honour also helped to explain why Winchester, unlike most British towns and cities, has no single stone memorial listing the names of its Great War dead and why the people of Fulflood and Weeke, like other parishes, erected their own parish memorials.

There are others who we would like to thank for their help with this book. Barrie Brinkman kindly contributed a history of Weeke which describes the many changes that took place in that half of the parish in the years leading up to the Great War. Colin Bulleid, curator of the Royal Hampshire Regiment Museum and Archive, Winchester, cheerfully answered queries about the regiment’s role in the war and provided access to the rich seam of records relating to the 4th Battalion, The Hampshire Regiment. The staff at the Hampshire Record Office, Winchester, also patiently dealt with our many research enquiries. We are grateful to the Hyde 900 and King Alfred College (Diocesan Training College) Great War memorial projects for their mutual support.

The changes to house numbering and street names that have taken place in the parish - particularly in Fulflood - have made tracing some of the men difficult in the extreme. However, thanks to the original work of Chris Piles who made us aware of the problem, and the help of Polly Cook we believe we may have succeeded in unravelling this particular ‘Gordian Knot’. Thanks, too, to Andrew Hoggart, lately of The Roebuck Inn, Stockbridge Road, who pointed us in the direction of its role in the community. Richard Buchanan spent many hours collating the material and preparing it for publication. He also produced the Street Index which shows where in Fulflood, Weeke and elsewhere in Winchester the parish’s Great War dead lived.

Geoff Cuell, Christine Vear and the late Janice Merritt kindly shared family memories of Reginald Clark, Herbert Tong and Leslie Jacob respectively and provided photographs. Thanks, too, to Rob and Penny Matthews, of 14, Avenue Road, for allowing us to copy the photograph of Harold Forster. Incredibly, it was still in the house when they moved in - 90 years after Harold lived there!

Simon Newman took the photographs of the St Paul’s Memorial Board and the Memorial Book at St Matthew’s featured in the section on the origins of the parish memorials as well as the photograph of the St Thomas School Memorial, now held at Kings School. The photographs of the houses in which the parish fallen lived were taken by the authors.

The people listed below made generous donations to assist in the publication of the book and the overall project. We would particularly like to thank the parish of St Matthew’s with St Paul’s for their help and financial assistance, and the Winchester Cathedral Guides for their large donation following a tour of the Western Front conducted by Derek Whitfield in September 2018.