HEROISM came in many different shapes and forms during the First World War.

Rowland Steventon, for example, joined the Royal Horse Artillery (RHA) when he was only 16 at the start of the war. The RHA specialised in moving its 13 pound guns – comparatively light weapons – rapidly along the Western Front to support the soldiers in the trenches.

Gunner Steventon lasted all four years in the trenches – something of a minor miracle in itself – and when he was demobbed, he and his brother decamped from their native Shropshire to Darlington, where they found work as wire-drawers in the Darlington Wire Mills on Albert Hill.

Gunner Steventon met a local girl, married, and settled down, living first in Harrowgate Hill and then in Teal Road where his son, Roland (WITHOUT A W), was born in 1935.

"He didn't talk about the war at all," says Roland. "All I know is that he was very, very lucky to survive."

All he really has to tell of his father's war service is a testimonial, and it speaks volumes. It was presented to Gunner Steventon on June 17, 1919, by the Royal Humane Society.

The society was formed in 1774 by two London doctors who wanted to encourage the newly-discovered art of resuscitation. They felt that some of the 123 people who drowned in the Thames that year might have been saved had someone been around to give them mouth-to-mouth. To encourage people to have a go, they formed the Society for the Recovery of Persons Apparently Drowned and offered two guineas to an attempting a rescue and four guineas to anyone who succeeded in reviving a drowned person.

Over time, the unwieldy name of the Persons Apparently Drowned society was changed to the more formal Royal Humane Society (RHS), and it was the RHS which took notice of Gunner Steventon's heroism.

The testimonial says that he had "gone to the rescue of Gunner McWaters who was in imminent danger of drowning in the canal at Virginal, Belgium, and whose life he gallantly saved".

Gunner Steventon died in 1953 aged 54, and the story of his bravery passed with him – although Roland still treasures the RHS' certificate which tells the bare bones of his bravery.

BLOB THE canal in the Virginal-Samme area of Belgium in which Gunner McWaters tumbled is probably the Brussels-Charleroi canal. It was dug in the late 1820s to carry coal into the Belgian capital city. By contrast, here in south Durham a few years before, the canal solution to the problems of moving coal had been rejected in favour of the new-fangled "loco-motive" on a railway.