Contributed Cuttings & Photographs

Charles Edwin Stone was born in Belper on 4 February 1889, the tenth of thirteen children of George Edward Stone and Mary Ellen. The family settled in a farm cottage on Sandbed Lane, Openwoodgate, and he attended the Pottery School. After his mother's death in 1906 the younger children were largely raised by their older siblings. On leaving school he worked as a miner, first at New Denby Hall Pit and later at Salterwood Colliery.

He enlisted as a Gunner in the Royal Field Artillery on 12 September 1914, joining C Battery, 83rd Brigade, and went to France in July 1915. His brother Ernest was killed in action in 1917. Later that year, during the Battle of Passchendaele, Charlie was awarded the Military Medal for stepping in to man the guns and tending the wounded under fire.

His Victoria Cross action came on 21 March 1918 at Caponne Farm. After six hours at his gun under gas and shell fire he carried an order to the rear, then returned through the barrage with a rifle to help hold a sunken road, lay in the open under machine-gun fire, defended the right flank of the two rear guns single-handed and joined the party that captured a machine-gun and four prisoners.

He was invested by King George V at Buckingham Palace on 28 June 1918. Belper presented him with a gold watch and chain and £100 in War Bonds, Ripley with a further £100 — all of which he gave to the Belper Workhouse. Demobbed as a Lance Bombardier in January 1919, he returned to Salterwood Colliery, later worked at Heywood Farm near Ashbourne (where he saved a fellow worker, Miss Elizabeth Lees, from severe burns), threw the ball for the Ashbourne Shrovetide football match in 1924 and worked for Rolls-Royce in Derby for some twenty years in a foundry nicknamed "Dante's Inferno". He met King George VI there in 1940 and the Duke of Edinburgh in 1949.

Charles Edwin Stone died at Derby City Hospital on 29 August 1952 and was buried with full military honours beside his mother in Belper Cemetery. His medals were bequeathed to the Royal Artillery Institute.

William Gregg was born in Heanor, Derbyshire, and the town has never forgotten him. His Victoria Cross action of 6–8 May 1918 at Bucquoy, with the 13th Battalion, Rifle Brigade, is marked by a commemorative paving stone of the kind laid for every First World War VC recipient born in the United Kingdom, set in the path of Heanor Memorial Park near the town's war memorial.

Heanor's swimming baths — which Alf noted as the site of a memorial to Gregg — are today the William Gregg VC Leisure Centre, his name in large letters across the front of the building.