Hundreds of people gathered in Minchinhampton on Sunday morning for the annual Remembrance Day service.
The service was led by Rev Canon Howard Gilbert and Rev Tracey Clements of Holy Trinity Church, and Steve Thomson, Minister at Minchinhampton Baptist Church. The last post was sounded by bugler Ken Weir and heralded the two-minutes’ silence at 11am.
Roger Sims, Chairman of Minchinhampton Royal British Legion, organised the event which saw wreaths being laid by representatives of Minchinhampton Royal British Legion, Holy Trinity Church, the Parish Council, the town’s Women’s Institute, Minchinhampton Girlguiding and Scouts, the British Legion’s Women’s section, and RAF Brize Norton.
For the first time wreaths were laid by Cllr Chloe Turner on behalf of Gloucestershire County Council, and Gary Atkinson, President of Minchinhampton Local History Society.
The service included the reading of all the names on the memorial. One of those was Minchinhampton resident Gilbert Lewis Brown who was killed in the early part of the First World War, having enlisted into the 1st Battalion of the Gloucestershire Regiment.
“He was one of the thousands who went missing in the first Battle of Ypres,” explained Brian Lett of Minchinhampton Local History Group.
“His remains were never found and there was nothing to come back to his parents except the Commemoration Medallion, which was issued at the end of the war to all those families of the fallen.”
The medallion disappeared for more than a century, only to be tracked down by the history group to Hansons auction house in Derbyshire where it went under the hammer on the 109th anniversary of Gilbert’s death, November 7th, 1914.
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