Some years ago I sat in St Werburgh’s Church on Remembrance Sunday listening to the then Vicar Lawrence Price.

He said that it was not right that men who had died in the service of their country were known only by an initial and not their first names.

The tablets in the church are a rich source of history as they list the fist and second names and the date of death of the men who died during or as a result of the first world war. Most in not all are correct and have helped our research no end.

However the memorial on Dovedale Road lists men by initial only (apart from Robert Heywood) and that included two men added after the dedication of the stone and the men who died in the Second World War and a man who died in the Korean conflict.

The local British Legion set about putting this right and identified all bar one of the men (there was one or two wrongly identified but that was before the internet revolution)

That one man was J Tideswell.

One of the aims of the project was to identify him but we faced some obstacles in that he was not listed on the Commonwealth War Graves site indicating he was not buried in one of their cemeteries nor was he listed on the Ancestry site as a casualty of the war.

However a chance observation by one of the project team led to the ultimate discovery of who he was, how he died and the fact that and he is buried in the church yard of St Werburgh’s Church.

The anniversary of his death is fast approaching and he will be named and featured in the next few days.