CUMBRIAN soldiers will be remembered throughout this year thanks to a commitment made by a Furness town band.

To commemorate the First World War centenary, Dalton Town Band members will play The Last Post on the anniversaries of the deaths of soldier who lived in Dalton and Newton.

"It started with the mayor of Dalton," Mike Latimer, the band's conductor said. "She's written a book and researched the names that are on the First World War memorials in Dalton and Newton and she's tried to find out about them and where they were killed and buried.

"Using that as a basis we will commemorate each of the soldiers on the anniversaries of their deaths."

Mr Latimer explained that there were 178 soldiers named on the memorials and the job of playing the famous bugle call would rotate between four cornet players.

Having started in November last year, he explained that there had been a good reaction from the public so far.

"Of course sometimes it's damp and raining so the person playing is just there on their own," he said. "And sometimes there's a small group of people there."

The band, whose 22 members range from age 13 to 90, takes part in the town's Remembrance Day parade each year.

"But I think this is different because it commemorates each of them individually," he said. "It becomes about real people and we find out that they all had interesting lives.

"I think a lot of the people in the band are in their teens and early twenties and they realise they were about the same age as them and they belonged to the local football team."

Ann Thurlow, Dalton's mayor who researched and wrote Who Do You Think They Were? said that the book took her 'many months' but she managed to find information about all but three of the soldiers.

"I think it makes a person real," she said. "If you know they played in the football team or worked in the Co-op."

In November of this year, the town council will be putting cards in the windows of the houses that the fallen soldiers had once lived in, as an additional way of remembering them.

"It makes you see how devastating it must have been for a town like Dalton," she said.

The next sounding of The Last Post will be tomorrow (January 12) at 7pm, at the Dalton war memorial.