Barrow’s Dock Museum finds hundreds more names of WW1 fallen

Researchers have identified hundreds more men associated with a town who died in World War One, but were not featured on its war memorial.

Volunteers worked with The Dock Museum in Barrow, Cumbria, to create an interactive map of soldiers’ stories and verified 885 Barrovian men among the 886,000 British military personnel who died in the conflict.

Curator Charlotte Hawley said it was “considerably more” than the 583 names on the Barrow Park Cenotaph based on applications to the council from relatives.

She told BBC Radio Cumbria that families in the town were “massively impacted” at the time, adding the map would help people see “every man that left the town and didn’t return”.

The museum said the discrepancy was likely because people had moved away or emigrated.

Hawley said the map moved chronologically and a poppy appears for every man who did not return.

“There’s particular spikes like the Battle of Somme and the Battle of Loos where suddenly all these poppies appear on the town on the map,” she said.