Huddersfield's fallen soldiers in World War One will never be forgotten thanks to a remarkable lady.

In the mid 1980s Margaret Stansfield decided to find out more about the conditions her grandfather faced in the Flanders’ trenches.

She had just retired from her job as senior operating theatre sister at the Royal Halifax Infirmary and that interest sparked a monumental task that was to take up the next 20 years of her life.

For Margaret, pictured, painstakingly researched every one of the soldiers from the Huddersfield area killed in the First World War – and by the end had amassed 3,439.

But it doesn’t end there for she also discovered exactly how some of them died, revealing the incredible heroism behind many of the deaths.

And it’s human tragedy on a remarkable scale with stories revealing how Huddersfield men – some of them with several children – died in the most tragic circumstances.

Margaret was desperate to see all the names and stories recorded in a book and that will now happen with Huddersfield University set to publish it next year to commemorate the outbreak of World War One in August 1914.

Sadly Margaret died last December and so never had the chance to see all those countless hours of toil – usually in Huddersfield library – in print.

She lived in Elland with husband Alan, a metallurgist, who said: “Margaret’s grandfather actually survived the First World War but he was gassed and it badly affected what had been a wonderful singing voice.

“Margaret decided she wanted to know what he had been through and we went on a battlefield tour of the Somme.”

What she witnessed – including the Thiepval Memorial with 75,000 British names on it and the huge Lochnagar crater which had been filled with explosives by English tunnellers who blew a massive hole in the German lines on the first day of the Battle of the Somme in 1916 – moved her to do more. Far more.

After a second tour this time to the Menin Gate at Ypres in Belgium Alan said: “Margaret came home and said she had decided to do “a bit of research” and went to Halifax library.”

Alan said she was disappointed with the response to her search for a roll of honour so went to Huddersfield library where she asked the same question and this time staff said they had something in the basement and could she return the following week?

She did to be met with a large box filled with 1,800 proformas (questionnaires) sent out by the chief librarian to the families of fallen soldiers shortly after the war ended.

Nothing had been done with the information although Alan suspects there my have been a plan to put the names on bronze plaques on the war memorial in Greenhead Park.

After being told it would cost 20p to photocopy each page, Margaret decided to write them all out herself.

It took her weeks – months even – and just as she came to the end of her mammoth task the staff then asked Margaret if she was aware there were another seven boxes like it?

She wasn’t, but she set about it with a zeal, checking with the Huddersfield Examiner microfilm and other newspapers to squeeze as much information as she could behind each name.

And she even managed to find out where each is buried or where their name is on a memorial, helped by two men who visited each one in the Huddersfield area.

They were Ken Palmer from Marsh and the late Philip Gledhill from Bolster Moor.

During the searches Margaret helped many Huddersfield families to fill missing information on their family trees.

But perhaps her greatest triumph was spotting men who had not been remembered anywhere and rectifying that.

Some had been totally missed from the official records and their names were not on war memorials either here or overseas.

The late Margaret Stansfield
The late Margaret Stansfield

Margaret discovered two. One was Pte G H Inman who served under the name George Marsh and his name was added to the Menin Gate at Ypres in 1997.

The second was 39-year-old Pte Verdi Wood who was killed in action on October 12, 1916, and his name was added to the Thiepval Memorial in 2000 alongside those of 83 of his comrades from the 2nd Bn the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment who also died that day.

This memorial is for the 72,191 missing British and South African men who died in the battles of the Somme of the First World War between 1915 and 1918.

Margaret has left Huddersfield a lasting legacy – one which will be there for future generations to never forget the immense human sacrifice this town made between 1914 and 1918.

Here's how Margaret’s list is broken down.

This work on the 3,439 names from Huddersfield was carried out by First World War expert and battlefield tour guide Martin Middlebrook.

3,333 served in the Army including one woman, staff nurse Ada Stanley

39% of them were serving with the local Duke of Wellington’s Regiment

64 were in the Royal Navy and the merchant navy

40 were in the air forces which at that time included the Royal Flying Corps, the Royal Naval Air Service and the Royal Air Force

Two civilians – one man killed in a munitions factory explosion and the other a Mersey harbour pilot who drowned when the ship he was taking into Liverpool Bay was blown up by a mine.

130 servicemen died between 1919 and 1921 as result of what happened to them during the war.

The break down of ranks were: 2,692 privates or equivalents, 508 non-commissioned officers, 21 warrant officers, 107 junior officers such as subalterns and captains, three Lieutenant-Colonels, one Major and one staff nurse.

The medals they earned included six Military Crosses, one Military Cross and Bar, 44 Military Medals, four Military Medal and Bar, 12 Distinguished Conduct Medals, two Distinguished Conduct Medals and Bar (one of the original DCMs had been awarded in the Boer War), three Meritorious Service Medals, one Distinguished Service Medal, two Distinguished Service Orders and one Order of the British Empire.

How they are remembered – 1,604 men and one nurse in military cemeteries, 1,193 commemorated on war memorials to the missing, 348 buried at graveyards near to where they lived and 189 buried or commemorated in other countries.

Alan Stansfield with a death penny given to bereaved families of WW1 servicemen
Alan Stansfield with a death penny given to bereaved families of WW1 servicemen