Cheltenham Civic Society was awarded a National Lottery Heritage Fund grant for the conservation of the crosses and, in 2018-19, students from Pittville School initiated the Pittville Remembers Project.
Fourteen students from the school volunteered to follow the conservation work and research the background of those soldiers identified on the crosses.
The project offered the students the chance to delve into what is contained in original, historical documents to explore the lives of (once) living, breathing Cheltonians. The students’ enthusiasm drove them to research trench diaries, trawl through newspaper archives and avidly examine the censuses of 1901 and 1911, to discover details of the soldiers’ lives and where in Cheltenham their families lived. Some even travelled to the National Archives in Kew to view some of the documents in person.
The students’ body of work has since been used to contribute to the Cheltenham Remembers project about the town’s role in the Great War. Their research on the lives of the individual soldiers also formed the main body of content for the project’s booklet Cheltenham Cemetery Great War Crosses – downloadable here.
