WW1 national memorial to get permanent home in Somerset

A planning application has been submitted to house the Poppy of Honour in Maidenbrook Country Park

A memorial to a million soldiers lost in the First World War could be permanently housed near Taunton.

A planning application has been submitted to Somerset Council for the Poppy of Honour Pavilion to be sited at Maidenbrook Country Park.

It was made in 2018 to honour those killed or missing in WW1 and has since been on display across the country.

It includes 1,117,635 poppies handwritten with a soldier's rank and name.

The Poppy of Honour was designed by former light infantryman Terry Williams, who was asked to carry the union flag at WW1 rededication ceremonies in France and Belgium in 2014 and 2015.

"These cemeteries, with thousands and thousands of headstones: You are stood in the middle holding your national flag, paying tribute to these men and women who have lost their lives. It really, really affected me," said Mr Williams.

On his return to the UK he was told by the Home Office that there was no national memorial collectively commemorating those killed or missing in action during the war, and instead every village, town and city has its own memorial honouring just local people.

"At the moment they're [the soldiers] remembered in the battlefields and I wanted to bring them home, so to speak," he said.

The national memorial is made of two large glass sides so that the individual poppies inside can be seen - each representing someone listed by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission as killed or missing during what became known as "The Great War".

The Poppy of Honour will be the first memorial collectively commemorating all the service personnel who died in the First World War.

The rank, name and date of each individual soldier was handwritten onto more than a million poppies

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'Absolutely overwhelming'

In 2017 Mr Williams appealed on social media for people to help handwrite the rank, name and date of each soldier onto more than one million individual poppies when he realised the task was too great for his small team.

"The response was absolutely overwhelming," he said. "Within three weeks we had over 280,000 volunteers. We set up hubs in local areas in 37 other countries and sent them the poppies to distribute with the lists.

"That speeded up the signing of the poppies quite dramatically. I think what caught people's imagination about this remembrance is that instead of writing a relative's name, they were remembering somebody else. That had a profound effect on everyone.

"I feel very humbled that the memorial is going to be staying in Somerset. It seemed quite right and fitting that a memorial created and constructed within the county should stay within the county.

"The day we actually see the memorial permanently installed within its glass enclosure, there will be a lot of tears and hugs and I hope those volunteers all around the world will think we've achieved something truly remarkable," he added.

Once the Poppy of Honour has a permanent home it can be registered as an official memorial with the War Memorial Trust, the Imperial War Museum and the National Archive.

The outcome of the planning application is expected by March 2024 with the installation completed by 6 June, the 80th anniversary of D-Day.

The memorial has already been on display in 19 towns across the country