TODAY there will be a debate in the House of Commons on “The preparations for the commemoration of the First World War”.

I hope to contribute.

“The Great War” affected every town and village in Britain. In every community there stands a memorial to those who lost their lives fighting for their country. My constituency of Sedgefield is no different. From Hurworth on the River Tees in the south to the former colliery village of Thornley in the north, those who served and died are honoured and remembered.

At least 1,500 men from the constituency were killed in what was called “the war to end all wars”. In Ferryhill, more than 130 gave their lives. In Chilton, more than 100.

In Thornley, 134. In Wingate, 147. In Wheatley Hill, 96.

All of these communities were colliery villages and many men volunteered rather than go down the pit. In the army, they were sure to be fed and clothed, and would be able to stand up straight – plus, of course, the war would be over in a few weeks.

I believe the numbers of soldiers around the constituency commemorated on memorials to be an underestimate of the total losses in many cases. Take the Trimdons as an example. In 1914, more than 2,000 miners worked down the local pits and the memorial on the wall of St Alban’s church in Trimdon Grange tells us that 450 served in the war. That memorial also lists the names of 94 who did not return.

There’s another memorial at Trimdon Station which has the names of 79 men on it, but the two memorials share many of them.

Therefore, it looks as if the Trimdons sacrificed about 150 of their young men.

However, new research by Adam Luke, an Oxford University student from Trimdon Village, has revealed 199 men from the Trimdons were killed, the equivalent of 45 per cent of those who served. This is a staggeringly tragic statistic.

During the war years, there were just under 1,000 households in the Trimdons.

Therefore every household must have been affected in some way by the catastrophe of the European battlefields.

The Battle of the Somme started on July 1, 1916, and saw the worst loss of life in British military history with 20,000 killed that day alone. The Trimdons lost 11 sons that day.

FOR example, Private Martin Durkin from Trimdon Grange served with the 26th Tyneside Irish Battalion, the Northumberland Fusiliers.

On July 1, his battalion set off across no man’s land, marching “as if on parade under heavy machine gun and shell fire”. Pte Durkin did not return to Trimdon Grange.

He has no known grave and was one of his battalion’s 489 casualties that day.

Or Private WS Barnes, of the 1st Battalion, the Border Regiment, who left his wife in Lower Hogg Street, Trimdon Grange. Pte Barnes was one of the many, according to the regiment’s war diary, who was “wiped out by machine gun fire”. The Battalion suffered 619 casualties, and Pte Barnes rests in Mailly Wood Cemetery in France.

Or Private Frederick Hunter of the Royal Fusiliers. He was one of his battalion’s 227 casualties who were involved in fierce handto- hand combat. His mother Jane in Trimdon, herself a widow, lost a son that day.

By the end of the Somme campaign fourand- a-half months later, 39 Trimdon families had lost a son, husband, father or brother.

Half of the men have no known grave.

Mr and Mrs Shorthouse of Pringle Street in Trimdon Colliery experienced the loss of a second son in six months when Fred was killed on the Somme on November 8, just days before the end of the campaign.

Many of the streets and terraces of First World War Trimdon are no longer there, but it can still be recorded that Front Street, Trimdon Grange, lost four men to the war.

Railway Row, Deaf Hill, lost three. Cross Street, Trimdon Foundry, three. Kelloe Winning, four. Coffee Pot Street, Trimdon Colliery, four. The Plantations, Trimdon Grange five. The list goes on...

The research undertaken by Adam Luke will be placed in a Roll of Honour and will detail not just those from Trimdon killed in the First World War, but in all wars since.

The Trimdons have given up 269 of its own in conflicts since 1914.

At 10.30am on Monday, August 4, in St Mary Magdalene’s Church in Trimdon Village, like in many other places of worship up and down the land, a candlelit vigil will take place to remember the 199 Trimdon men killed in “the war to end all wars”.

The Trimdons’ loss was not unique, but it serves as a sobering reminder of the suffering all of our communities experienced between 1914 and 1918.