Lives of the First World War

"Around seventy men from Churchill joined the armed forces during the first world war, many of them brothers. Eleven of them died either in the fighting or in war-related events and are commemorated on the village war memorial. They are Hubert Betteridge, Percy Cooper, William Keen, Cecil Peachey, Wilfred Peachey, John Perrott, Ernest Webb, Frank Webb, Archie Widdows, Alfred Betteridge and Lewis Cooper. Many joined the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, including Percy Cooper who died in Mesopotamia. His brother Lewis died Dec 6 1917 in Halifax, Nova Scotia. During the war the village school headmaster, William Anson, arranged for photographs of men in the armed services to be displayed in the church porch, to encourage parishioners to remember them in their prayers."