They made the ultimate sacrifice when they answered the call to arms. Richard McComb looks at the staff of the Birmingham Post and Mail who died in the 'war to end all wars'.

There were 20 of them in all, a small band of Birmingham brothers made up of clerks, printers, packers, a linotype operator and a journalist.

They were recruited from the ranks of the Birmingham Post and Mail and were sent to the Western Front, where they died as a result of trench warfare, air raids or illness.

The eldest was 39 and the two youngest, who died years apart at Ypres, were just 19.

The then Birmingham Daily Post had played a unique role in the history of Army recruitment in August 1914. In an editorial at the outbreak of war, the Post urged the city’s “unmarried manhood” to form a local battalion. There could be “no question that patriotism insists that the unmarried shall offer themselves without thought or hesitation.”

Newspaper employees did not shirk their responsibilities. The names of those who did not return would join more than 12,000 others on Birmingham’s roll of honour. A further 35,000 local men were wounded in the 1914-18 conflict.

The names of the Post and Mail staff are commemorated on a memorial mounted in the modern-day newsroom, which today is based at Fort Dunlop. The building opened in 1917, the year of the Battle of Passchendaele which claimed a quarter of a million British casualties.

Visitors to what is now called BPM Media pass the memorial. Occasionally they might stop and read the dedication to the “staff of the Post & Mail who gave their lives for England 1914-1918.” Below the names is etched the words: “A city’s strength is not in her walls or in her ships but in her sons.”

Staff lost in the Second World War – at 19, the total was almost identical – are recorded on a separate panel.

I first saw the memorial in the 1990s, when the newspapers were based at Weaman Street in the city centre. I would give it a casual glance, wonder briefly what had happened to the men, and walked on. Today, my desk is a few paces away from the bronze memorial. You know how it is when you get drawn to something? Well, that happened. It struck me that as a newspaper we should do something to find out about the heroes from our not so distant past. We are only three years away from marking the centenary of the outbreak of the war to end all wars.

Our knowledge of the Post and Mail’s war dead is far from complete. We hope that by highlighting the men’s plight amid the annual Armistice commemorations, relatives may come forward with fresh information. Should you have any details, please get in touch.

According to statistical averages, the Post & Mail lost five workers a year, most of them on the Western Front. But averages are misleading. The first deaths did not hit the newspapers’ staff until 1915, when three died. The darkest year was 1917, when nine employees were killed.

It is also worth noting that nine of the men – almost half their number – have no known grave, their mortal remains lost to the cloying mud of northern France and Belgium. Lacking a formal burial, their names are recorded on the famous memorials to heroism and loss, at Thiepval, the Menin Gate, Tyne Cot and Arras.

One of the men died on the first day of the Battle of the Somme in 1916, the single most disastrous day in the history of the British Army. Newspaper clerk Cpl Edward Parker, of the 1/6th battalion, the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, was killed in the attack on the Serre Quadrilateral, one of 57,470 British casualties that day.

A report on the opening day of the battle, published in the Birmingham Daily Mail to mark the sixth anniversary, recounted what happened to Parker’s battalion: “By 11am 2nd Lt J G Cooper was the only officer of the 1/6th Battalion untouched, and a dwindling handful of men of the 1/6th and 1/8th [Royal Warwickshire Regiment] was left amongst the heaps of dead and dying to man the Quadrilateral against counter-attacks from both flanks and the crossfire of the German machine guns. It was useless to remain, impossible to go forward.”

By sunset, four companies of the 1/6th were reduced in strength to two weak platoons. The battalion suffered 457 casualties. Parker, aged 26, of George Street, Balsall Heath, had been awarded the Military Medal for bravery.