Whilst we were doing our first Sounding the City project at Arnos Vale we found Soldiers Corner, which contains 240 graves of men who died in the First World War. As 2014 is the centenary of the outbreak of the war, a group of us decided to research this as a separate project.
We found out that most of the men buried at Arnos Vale died at local hospitals, including the 2nd Southern General (now the BRI) and the Beaufort Military Hospital in Stapleton (now part of the University of the West of England). Casualties from the Western Front came into Bristol on hospital trains to Temple Meads built by Brunel (nearly 70,000 arrived during the war) or hospital ships to Avonmouth (over 36,000 arrived).
Around 56,000 men from Greater Bristol enlisted at the outbreak of WWI with many more already serving. Almost 7,000 of them never came home.
Through our research we found a lot of amazing black and white photographs and transcripts of WW1 experiences that helped us understand the personal side to a major historical event.