AS we approach our annual Remembrance commemoration, we think of the names on our town’s war memorial.

There are 248 casualties listed there from the First World War.

Many years ago I set myself a challenge to not only research the stories behind those names, but also to sort of “resurrect” them through their photographs and, where possible, by gathering together their (posthumous) medals and memorial plaques (the so-called ‘Dead Man’s Penny’).

It hasn’t proved an easy task. So far I know what at least 23 of them looked like and have collected five medals and three plaques.

With those low numbers, you can imagine that I get very excited when I receive a tip-off that Maldon-related medals are on the market.

One such alert came recently when a friend of mine noticed a medal pair on a popular online auction site.

I was determined to win them and thankfully, with the help of another friend, I did.

They consist of the standard British War Medal and Victory Medal (indicating active service post December 31, 1915) and are inscribed ‘40202 Pte CG Burnes Ches R’.

Research reveals that Clifford George Burnes was a Maldon lad.

We know that he was born in April 1882, the son of George and Hannah Burnes, and that the family home was at number 8 Fambridge Road.

By a strange coincidence, my cousin now owns number 8 and is well aware of the Burnes’ period of tenure, including that an adjacent plot on the corner of Spital Road (now occupied by Petchey Court, the offices of TaxAssist and Ware View Terrace) was once known as Burnes Field.

George Burnes (born in Maldon in 1850) married Althorne girl Hannah in 1881 and in due course they had six children – Ethel, Mary, Eva, Ada, Cecil and our soldier, Clifford.

George was variously a broker, cabinet maker and upholsterer, furniture dealer and (by 1911) an invalid who had, along with Hannah, left Maldon to live in Manor Park.

Clifford, nevertheless, spent his formative years here in Maldon and with eight of them occupying the same small terraced house in Fambridge Road, it must have been a somewhat cramped upbringing.

He was registered as a nine-year old ‘scholar’ in the 1891 Census and probably attended the nearby National School in London Road (which became All Saints’ Primary).

By 1901 the now 19-year-old had flown the nest and was a draftsman, boarding in West Ham.

In 1910 Clifford married a girl called Lily and by 1911 the couple were living in Hammersmith with their first child, Ronald.

Clifford Burnes was, at that stage, the manager of a shop (‘corn and grocery’) and with two more children – Winifred (born in 1912) and Olive (born 1915) – the picture is of an established family with a steady income.

By the time Olive came along, however, the Great War for Civilisation had been raging for a year and it was inevitable that Clifford would move towards military service. Records indicate that he attested for the Army and enlisted at St Pancras on December 12, 1915, initially in the Royal Field Artillery (as Gunner 208903).

He was posted on February 21, 1917, and by the August of that year had been compulsory transferred (as 300365) into the relatively newly formed Tank Corps.

His time with the Corps was, however, to be short-lived and a further transfer took him to the 3rd (Reserve) Battalion, the Cheshire Regiment (as Private 40202).

That battalion was a training unit, based in the UK, to provide drafts for other battalions. Sure enough, Clifford was sent out to France on October 10, 1917, and allocated to the 1st Battalion.

The 1st Cheshires were variously backwards and forwards in the line, and in reserve throughout the rest of 1917 and into what would be the final year of the war.

By June 1918 they were in the Thiennes area on the Western Front, in northern France, and on June 5 pleased to be behind the lines at Arcade Camp for “cleaning up and re-organisation”.

It was relaxed enough to allow passes for 25 percent of each company.

Sadly, it would seem, Clifford wasn’t among them and, instead, at 3pm on June 6 he faced the wrath of hostile shelling. Five men were killed in the attack, including Clifford.

Along with his four comrades – Drummer Cave and Privates Marshall, Dykes (MM), and Weaver – his body was laid to rest in Tannay British Cemetery – Rupert Brooke’s “a corner of a foreign field that is for ever England” and, dare I say in Clifford’s case, the repository of “a dust whom (Maldon) bore, shaped, made aware”.

As they had moved away, his parents never had the opportunity to have their son’s name included on our war memorial, but he has since been added, his medals have now finally come home and the entrance to number 8 Fambridge Road will forever (in my mind at least) be the threshold to his childhood home.