I am writing this Hub on the morning of 11th November 2008, exactly, almost to the hour, 90 years after the guns finally fell silent at the end of World War I.

I felt that this would be a good day to look at the diary that my uncle, Frank Welford, wrote at the time, as he was one of the people responsible for firing those guns.

He kept a diary throughout his period of service, and I have those diaries today. They were written in pencil in small diary notebooks, and much of the writing has smudged over the years and is now virtually unreadable. However, in later life he wrote a summary of those diaries in ink, in the notebook that I now have in front of me.

His job was to calculate the directions and trajectories of artillery pieces similar to those in the picture. As he wrote, "my fighting was done with maps, range tables and slide rules".

That is not to say that he had an easy war, although he was spared most of the horror of the trenches. He was wounded by shrapnel at Ypres in June 1917 and invalided home, only returning to the front in April 1918. Three days later, his brother (George) was badly wounded on another part of the front, although they both survived the war and became teachers, eventually at the same Grammar School in Dorset.

Frank's entry for 11 November 1918 reads:

"Armistice signed - we celebrated as far as possible"

It took some time for the soldiers to return, and it was not until January 1919 that Frank and his brother went home. The diary entries read:

"Being a student [he had started at Reading University in 1914, before being called up in 1916, so he had a year to complete] in a high priority for demobilisation, I left the battery, travelling from Mons via Arras and Abbeville to Dieppe. Here I passed through the baths and clothes-cleaning centre (after a 2-day wait). By ship to Southampton, then troop train via Romsey and Salisbury to Fovant Camp, ending on the camp railway. Here I handed in my equipment, etc, stayed one night, leaving at 5.00am by train to Blandford, arriving at breakfast-time and finding George already home. My discharge - technically transfer to the Reserves - counted as being on Feb 25.

"Returned to Reading University [at that time an external college of London University] in October. Was greeted with "we thought you had been killed - your name is on the College list of the dead". I completed my degree, receiving a grant - barely enough to live on - as an ex-Serviceman. The students were a strange mixture of wartime Army, Navy and Air Force, mostly ex-officers, and youngsters fresh from school."

At the age of 22, Frank's war was over, although the memories lasted a lifetime. A lifelong bachelor, he lived with my family, so in effect I grew up with three parents and I heard many of his war stories at first hand. He died in 1977 at the age of 81.

The Welfords were luckier than many families. Although the two brothers were wounded, they lived to tell the tale, which many others did not. George also fought in World War Two, whereas Frank served in the Home Guard and their younger brother Gordon, my father, was too young for the first war and did not have good enough eyesight for the second. There are also no records of cousins, etc, having been killed in either war.

However, many other families were not so fortunate, and many telegrams arrived at homes all over the country bearing bad news, even on Armistice Day itself. This is a day to remember the sacrifices of all those young men who did not come home.