WWI Memorial plaque located

I received this email from the Trust over the weekend, hopefully they don’t mind me sharing it verbatim here.

We have found what we thought was lost!
To manage their audit and cataloguing of every piece of Wycombe Wanderers memorabilia at Adams Park, members of the Frank Adams Legacy Limited board formed a working party bringing in a few extra volunteers for this massive task. While searching through cupboards and moving items that haven’t been moved for many years, they discovered a rather dusty memorial plaque listing names of WWFC Vice Presidents, Members and Players who fought and died in the First World War.
Research in the last few days has revealed that this wooden plaque was unveiled at Loakes Park sometime between 1919 and 1921 and it is believed it remained on display in the boardroom until the ground closed in 1990.
At the time of the centenary commemorations for WW1 back in 2014 this plaque could not be found and was therefore classified as ‘missing’ and a new brass version commissioned.
Now that we have found the original, it has been cleaned and partly restored and currently looks like this:

Are you a relative of anyone named here? If so, we would love to hear from you. Please drop us an email to wwst@wwst.org.uk
The plan now is to complete the restoration of this piece of history and then display it at Adams Park for all to see.

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This is such wonderful news and a great piece of our history found.

A lot can be explained in this well researched piece from Chairboys On The Net : www.CHAIRBOYS.co.uk - The Great War Wanderers

My good ladies father used to run the CWGC back in the day and one of his postings took them to live in Arras for 3 years when she was a teenager.

Last September 2024 we took a long weekend in North Eastern France/Belgium and visited Arras, a large number of cemeteries and the CWGC Visitor Centre where her father had been based. Highly recommend this centre. More importantly to me we visited every resting place of each of the players above, some are only commemorated on huge memorials like Thiepval and some are buried in the beautifully tended cemeteries.

While we were at Thiepval we came across the Leyton Orient and Clapton Orient visit to France and joined in the service of commemoration. Bing Videos

I look forward to seeing the plaque soon.

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A few more photos from the trip.

The Missing poster in the visitor centre at Thiepval shows 100 missing men of 72337 commemorated at this site. Foolishly I asked the lady at the desk if she had a list of all the men on the poster as the terminal was down, I hoped one might be one of three Wanderers here. To my amazement the hero in A3 is Alexander James (Jock) Love, it threw me completely and I must admit I had to walk off in to the corner for a long moment to myself.

Not sure if you will be able to read the paper clipping for Stanley Lacey Smith but I believe the sergeant who reported his death could be G “Bunny” Fowler.

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Great that we could today assemble some of the relatives of those who paid the ultimate sacrifice more than a century ago, to be photographed with the rediscovered wooden WW1 memorial plaque.
Also present were members of the Frank Adams Legacy Limited memorabilia working party,

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Brilliant @wwfcblue and thank you very much for sharing with us all. :+1::+1:

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