A SERVICE to remember the 61 soldiers from Wallyford, Whitecraig and Smeaton who lost their lives in the First World War will take place next Thursday (November 11).

The annual ceremony is held at the Crookston War Memorial at St Michael’s Parish Church, Inveresk.

It will get under way at 1.30am, with Alister Hadden, chairman of Wallyford Community Council, reading out the names of the fallen.

Andrew Agnew, pastor at the Wallyford Livingroom Church, will recite the poem In Flanders Fields before wreaths are laid at the memorial.

The hymn Abide With Me will be sung and The Last Post played on the bugle by Simon Lowden, from Wallyford, before Musselburgh Sea Cadets will lower the colours, followed by a two-minute silence at 11am.

The Reveille will be sounded and Jim McLean, a member of Wallyford Community Council, has arranged for Battle’s Over to be played on the sound system. Gordon Steven, deacon at St Clement’s Church in Wallyford, will give a Christian message.

Mr Hadden will then read out the Kohima Epitaph, which is carved on the memorial of the 2nd British Division in the cemetery of Kohima in north-east India. The service will end with the national anthem.

A service will also take place at St Clement’s Church in Wallyford on Remembrance Sunday, November 14, at 10am.

Wreaths will be laid in the church garden at 11am as a piper plays a musical tribute.

The Crookston Memorial was produced by local man Mr Carrick, is composed of red sandstone and stands nearly six feet high, with two reversed rifles and a wreath of laurels engraved at the top.

In the centre, a panel bears the names and regiments of those who were killed in the Great War of 1914-18.

Following the conflict, the communities of Wallyford, Smeaton and Deantown (now Whitecraig) decided to honour the men who fell with a memorial. They chose to erect the memorial at Crookston School, between and serving all the villages. It was unveiled on September 13, 1919, by Lieutenant Colonel Sir John Hope.

More than 100 former pupils had answered the call of duty and the names of 20 of them appeared on the memorial.

When Crookston School closed in about 1958, the memorial was taken to Inveresk Cemetery.

In 2014, Wallyford Community Council secured funding from the Centenary Memorials Restoration Fund, administered by the War Memorials Trust, along with funding from East Lothian Council’s Civic Pride Fund, to have restoration work carried out on the memorial stone.