THE real stories behind the names carved on a village war memorial have been brought to life in a new book which has taken seven years to research.

Friends Dave Bell and Norman Revell first became intrigued about the lives of the men after campaigning to raise £4,000 to have a village memorial restored.

Now Mr Bell, whose own brother was killed in the Second World War, has written a book, named the Egglescliffe Parish Roll of Honour, for his home area of Egglescliffe and Eaglescliffe, near Stockton.

The leather-bound book, which he hopes will be kept at the village church of St John the Baptist, details the lives of the men who died fighting for their country in the First and Second World Wars.

After exhaustive research, Mr Bell even details the cemeteries where each of the villages' 30 First World War servicemen and six from the Second War are buried.

He and Mr Revell, both active members of the Royal British Legion, even discovered two men from Egglescliffe and one from Yarm whose names had never been recorded on their respective memorials.

Comprehensive details of the men are recorded in the volume. For example, the book, tells the story of Private Harry Cordingley, who died in 1917 aged 18. Pte Cordingley was one of three sons who died in the space of nine years: his brother Harry died the following year, aged ,and 21-year-old John died in 1926.

There is also information on how the memorial, erected in 1919, was paid for by penny and tuppenny subscription and the thinking behind its placement - the villagers finally decided to place it near the church but not so close that non-Protestants would object.

Mr Bell and Mr Revell uncovered information by checking birth, marriage and death certificates and travelled to libraries and graveyards across the North-East and North Yorkshire, going as far as Wallsend in the north and Northallerton to the south.

The Northern Echo's records were checked, the Somme battlefield visited, the War Graves Commission contacted and many of the servicemen's families were tracked down.

The friends also researched the lives of fallen servicemen from nearby Urlay Nook.

"I already knew a lot about most of the men simply by coming from here," said Mr Bell.

"Others knew a lot about their own families. People in those days would often record details of their family in Bibles which have been kept. Things like that helped a lot, but it's taken a lot of hard work. I hope it brings back a picture of what the men were like and their lives."

There are no plans to publish the book but the possibility of adding the names of the three veterans discovered during the research to the war memorials will now be investigated.

Both Egglescliffe and Urlay Nook memorials were restored three years ago.