IT was a sombre occasion in Trinity College’s chapel yesterday, as people came together to remember the alumni who died in the First World War 100 years ago.

The college’s chaplain, the Rev Dr Emma Percy, said: “We had about 50 people, mostly old members of the college. This is the start of four years of remembering the 159 people from Trinity who fell in the war.”

In another nod to the college’s link to the war, the congregation heard Trinity alumnus Laurence Binyon’s famous poem For the Fallen.

The college has the earliest surviving handwritten manuscript of the poem.

Dr Percy said: “He wrote the poem very early in the war in his shock at all the young men who died. We have a handwritten edition of the poem, which we will have on display for the next four years.

“Every month we will put the names and information of the men who died in that month 100 years ago.”

Jericho resident and Trinity alumnus Gerald Peacocke, 83, a former headteacher, read the poem.

He said: “It was lovely, and a very moving poem. In a way it’s quite bitter as well as being very sad, of course.

“The famous fourth verse is a wonderful little statement about death.”

The verse reads: ‘They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.’

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