VIDEO: Can you help the Warnham Society find details about a World War One nurse?

JPCT 200114 S14040342x Members of Warnham Society are hoping to find information about Dorothy Salmon, a local nurse who died during the First World War -photo by Steve Cobb

Five members of the Warnham Society discovered that the name of Dorothy Lottie Salmon is featured on the village’s war memorial in Church Street.

Dorothy was born in 1899 and worked as a nurse during the war, around the time of her death.

Steve Lancaster is one of the members of the society hoping to find out more about her.

He said: “We have been through it with a fine-tooth comb and can’t find her at all.

“She is the only woman and she is the only person we don’t know where they died.

“She was in the VAD (Voluntary Aid Detachment), so we contacted the Red Cross but those records have gone as well.”

Dorothy was the daughter of the gamekeeper at Warnham Court.

JPCT 200114 S14040317x Members of Warnham Society are hoping to find information about Dorothy Salmon, a local nurse who died during the First World War -photo by Steve Cobb

Records from the 1911 census indicate that the Salmon family resided in Keepers Cottage, Robin Hood Lane.

It also shows she was born in Witley, Surrey.

A parish magazine states that she died in 1918, from an illness contracted from ‘discharging her duties in a military hospital’.

Members of the Salmon family - most likely the offspring of Miss Salmon’s brother - still lived in Warnham into the 1950s.

The society is searching for information about Dorothy as part of a book about Warnham residents’ service in World War One.

A total of 43 Warnham residents, including Dorothy, died during the war, with 246 people from the village involved in some way.

Steve added: “The original concept was to look at the names on the memorial and find out a bit about them.

“Since we started we found there are other names not on the memorial that should be.

“From small beginnings it has become this thing with 246 people so it really needs to be a book, focusing on those people and particularly the ones that died.”

The group is hoping to publish the book in May or June.

The other members of the society working on the book’s production are Susan Overton, Elizabeth Bridges, George Elliott and Rachel Hamer.

To mark 100 years since the First World War, the County Times is reporting news from 1914 on the website, months before the outbreak of war.

Can you help the Warnham society? Get in touch via their website.