War memorial to be left blank for fear of mistakes Published duration 6 November 2015

image copyright Young Johnson image caption The £130,000 granite war memorial is due to be in place in Tidworth next year

A new war memorial will have no names inscribed on it in case errors are included.

The new installation will commemorate 40 soldiers from Tidworth, Wiltshire, who have died in battle since 1914.

Chris Franklin, town mayor, said the memorial committee's decision to "omit the names" seemed to be "purely based on it being too much of a risk".

But committee member Daz Stephenson said it wants the town council to complete the research on the soldiers.

'A damp squib'

Despite being a garrison town, Tidworth has never had an official war memorial to commemorate those who lost their lives since World War One.

"We've done an awful lot of work looking into the names but there's a lot of obscurity and we don't want to get it wrong," said Mr Stephenson.

"We would prefer to hand over the memorial next year and leave it up to the town council to do that research and make the decision to put the names on or not."

But Mr Franklin said "quite a bit of research" had already been done and adding the names later would be a "bit of a damp squib".

"We're coming up to Remembrance and the normal saying is - When you go home tell them of us and say: for your tomorrow we gave our today," he said.

"The clue there is 'tell them of us' - if there's no names they can't tell us."

The £130,000 granite memorial is due to be in place next year.