8th Battalion Royal Warwickshire Regiment
Within Aston Parish Church there is a Memorial Book dedicated to the fallen from the 8th Battalion RWR which had its barracks in Witton Lane, Aston - around 400 yards from the Church. A cenotaph outside the Church is also dedicated to the men of the 8th Battalion.
Although the barracks was in Aston, the Battalion comprises men from all over the country: officers who were given a commision in the Battalion could have come from anywhere, and as the war progressed and casualties mounted men were transferred in from non-local regiments, or were deployed directly into the regiment from across the country as the Battalion needed more men. It is the local men that will take prominence here, but for completeness details of those who did not live in Aston, or who had no obvious association with it, are listed separately with more limited address information.
There are 915 names of the fallen in the Memorial Book, of which 41 are officers. As this website seeks to identify Aston men who died during the Great War, I publish two lists below. The first lists the men known to have been living in Aston at or near the beginning of the war; this totals 279 men. The remaining 636 men are from elsewhere, and although some are from Birmingham and the surrounding counties of Staffordshire, Warwickshire and Worcestershire, the spread reaches from Cornwall to Scotland. Some of these non-Aston men had been in other regiments, and I have included this in the second listing when I have identified it. This latter listing gives ALL 915 names.
Complete Listing (including those from Aston)
The map below gives the residence distribution of the Aston men across the Aston area (see Defining Aston).