IN SPRING 2018, with the World War One Armistice commemorations fast approaching, I began researching the 48 names on the war memorials in the villages of the Lower Windrush valley in Oxfordshire.

My interest was in the lives of these men before war took them away from their homes and families, rather than in the military side of things.

I wanted to explore rural society in our area through the prism of these solemn lists, and I was not disappointed: from the workhouse boy who became an early submariner to the officer who proved to be not quite a gentleman, all of life is here.

One of many preconceptions quickly overturned was that the men going from the countryside were all wide-eyed ploughboys who had never left the village before.

Family connections as far afield as Islip, Charlton on Otmoor, and Wootton by Woodstock show that people moved about the county and beyond, especially following paid work. This is what connected a Standlake family with the well-known Honours of Charlton-on-Otmoor.

James T Johnson, known in the family as ‘Thomas’, was born in Standlake in December 1888, the youngest surviving child of five, and with four sisters.

His eldest sister Annie struck out into the world and went into service in Bethnal Green. There she met and married a Viennese waiter called Jacques John Saxl, known as ‘John’.

In the spring of 1911 John was evidently away, because Annie and her tribe of six children – aged from 12 years down to a babe-in-arms – descended on the Johnson family home at Bay Tree Cottage in Standlake. Twenty-three year-old Thomas promptly made his exit.

Escaping the chaos at home, Thomas headed for Charlton-on-Otmoor where he stayed with a branch of the Honours, a well-established farming family, in their home at Box Villa.

Head of the household James Honour was a ‘hayter’, or hay-binder and dealer. Animals needed feeding all year round, and the new railway station a mile north of the village would have enabled Mr Honour to despatch fodder to a capital city powered largely by horses.

But Thomas’s connection with the Honours was through another member of the household. James Honour’s daughter Elsie was married to a Standlake carpenter named Herbert Brunker, evidently an acquaintance of Thomas’s.

Thomas himself did not follow his father’s trade of carpentry; he worked as a painter. Insufficient work in a country village would oblige tradesmen like Thomas to travel the country seeking employment, and this may be another reason for the visit to Charlton-on-Otmoor.

However, an added attraction in the Honour household was Elsie’s elder sister, Fencott-born dressmaker Florence Honour. Two years after the 1911 visit, Thomas carried Florence off to Standlake where the couple married in March 1913.

Florence gave birth to a daughter named Lilian Bessie in May 1914, but soon afterwards the young couple’s plans for a life and family together were interrupted by international events beyond their control.

Thomas’s service number suggests that he may have joined up with the Ox & Bucks Light Infantry in the early days of the war. The battalions of the Ox & Bucks on the Western Front saw extensive service during the Battle of the Somme (July 1 to November 18), suffering heavily.

On July 28, 1916, the 2nd Ox & Bucks moved to front-line trenches near Waterlot Farm and sustained heavy casualties at the battle there on July 30. James Thomas Johnson was killed in action on July 30, 1916, aged 28.

Thomas’s wife Florence appears to have returned to her own family in Charlton-on-Otmoor, presumably taking little Lilian with her. Members of the Honour family still live in the village today.

I feel I almost know personally the men I researched; the loss of their lives was a tragedy which words cannot sum up.

If only every parish in the land could research the names on its own World War One memorial, we might approach a full record of a lost generation.

Wouldn’t that be a fitting tribute?

Julie Ann Godson has written a book on her findings which can be found on Amazon for £10.99