A church launched an exhibition telling the lives and deaths of 15 of its congregation who did not survive the Great War.

The two-week exhibition, with £10,000 Heritage Lottery funding, was opened on Sunday and can be visited at Wanstead United Reformed Church, in Nightingale Lane.

 The exhibition, in partnership with Redbridge Museum and entitled Our 15: Remembered Lives, tells the story of the 15 names engraved on a stone plaque in the north aisle unveiled in 1921.

Reverend Jim Gascoigne said: “We’re delighted that the names on the memorial in the church on Nightingale Lane ‘live’ again.

“ ‘Our 15’ are young men whose stories we know something about – and we hope that the project will add to the Wanstead’s sense of community and social cohesion. 

“The memorial has always been there and with the centenary this year, people at the church were saying we need to find out who these people are.” 

Perhaps the most moving story was that of Wanstead resident Arthur Blogg, who was engaged to marry local woman Kate Manby before the war intervened.

He survived the Battle of the Somme but was shot dead aged 25 by a sniper a couple of months later in the small French village of Englebelmer.

Miss Manby never married anyone else and died aged 90 in 1981.

Margaretha Pollitt Brown, a member of the church who started the project, said: “Most of the war’s dead were buried near where they fell, in graves and cemeteries on foreign soil, and usually too far away for the bereaved families to visit even once. 

“We had no collective memory or written record of the lives of these 15 men and I was curious about them, and wanted to find out more about the lives they led in our local Wanstead community.”  

The exhibition is open until December 5 with opening times of 9.30am to 12pm Monday to Friday, and 11.30am to 4pm on Sundays.

It will then be opened again from April 19 to May 10 next year to mark the centenary of the deaths of the first two men who were killed in April 1915.