ANY reader who knows the work of Ken Porter and Steve Wynn will open their latest book with a mixed sense of expectation and foreboding.

Town by town, community by community, the two local historians have been piecing together the story of south Essex in the First World War.

Their latest book covers Castle Point, or rather, since that name did not exist in 1914-18, Benfleet, Canvey and Hadleigh.

As before, it is a story of sadness and loss and the horror of conflict in the trenches. Yet once again you come away from the book moved by the guts, the endurance and, not least, the humour under stress of socalled “ordinary” Essex people.

The two authors start with a disadvantage.

“The living witnesses are no longer with us,” as they say in the introduction.

Like a lot of historians, they wish they had started on their work a bit earlier. As Ken said of a previous book: “Twenty years ago there were lots of people with direct memories we could have talked to at length. Now they are all gone.”

Given these restrictions, Ken and Steve do a capable job of using the material at their disposal.

Their research makes good use of local family collections, and – always a rich source of material – the letters pages in local newspapers.

These can be surprisingly graphic, at least until censorship kicked in later in the war. One local soldier, Private H J Parker, describes a sudden bout of shelling which hit his trench: “The next chap to me but one had the top of his head blown off. This was the first case of the kind I had seen, but heavens only knows I have seen scores since. The dead were lying in front of us like stones.”

Accounts like this remind us of the hell of battle which lies behind the bare names, cut into stone on the local war memorials.

Of course, for every soldier who died, there was a grieving family back home.

Stanley Ellison, of Benfleet, died in August 1914, at the Battle of Mons, the first major conflict involving British troops in the war. The day before he died, Stanley wrote a cheerful letter to his mother saying “all is quite well”. His mother and father went on believing all was well for a year, before they finally found about his death.

Poignantly, the family kept on writing letters to him, begging for him to write back.

“Let us have a line if possible as we are all very anxious about you,” is typical of his mum’s plaintive appeals to her dead son.

A century has passed since Mrs Ellison wrote that letter, yet its impact on a reader remains unblunted as a reminder of the sadness and sacrifice of those terrible years.

Luckily, the harrowing effects of this book are offset by moments of high comedy.

Some of the best stories concern the paranoia that followed Government warnings about “German spies in our midst.”

One Canvey resident, Henry Ubele, was accused of using carrier pigeons to convey messages to the enemy. No fewer than five soldiers turned up at his house, and the premises were searched from top to bottom in pursuit of the hidden birds.

But not so much as a feather could be found. Mr Ubele, it turned out, did not know one end of a pigeon from another.

ý Castle Point in the Great War is published by Pen & Sword Books @ £12.99 ISBN 1473823110