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This ticket for a Sunday School outing belonged to my mother's brother, Arthur Clark, whose name is written on the back. It is thin cardboard and measures 3 x 2 inches in imperial measure.

We found it among my grandmother's things when she died in 1970. Arthur had gone on to join the Gloucestershire Regiment in 1914, was transferred to the Machine Gun Corps and was lost on the first day of the battle of the Somme in 1916. He has no known grave. His mother had little left to remember him by, except a few photos, his letters from the front, and little keepsakes like this ticket. She kept his coat hanging on the kitchen door for forty years until she left the family home and his brothers and sisters revered his memory until their own deaths.

The ticket demonstrates the importance of the Sunday School in the life of the industrial working class in the early twentieth century, not only for religious and educational purposes, but also for recreation. The story of the ticket also says much about the personal loss endured by the generation caught up in the unprecedented conflict of the 1914-18 war.