FORMER soldier Steve Berridge’s fascination with the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry started when he began researching the life story of his great-grandfather, Corporal George Berridge, who served in the 1st Buckingham Battalion during the Battle of the Somme.

Following his family research, Mr Berridge began to transcribe the war diary and regimental chronicle of the 2nd Oxfordshire & Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, an ongoing task.

The former corporal in the Royal Green Jackets is a volunteer at the Soldiers of Oxfordshire Museum in Woodstock and often travels to war memorial sites in France.

He was one of the volunteers who greeted Princess Anne at the opening of the Woodstock museum in September, 2014.

The French and the Germans have been commemorating the Battle of Verdun, one of the most savagely fought and highest casualty battles of the First World War.

The battle, which lasted 300 days from February 21 to December 18, 1916, left an estimated 800,000 soldiers dead, wounded or missing.

According to Robin Draper, from Sutton Courtenay, who has written a history of the regiment entitled Redcoats to Riflemen, troops from the Ox and Bucks were not involved in the Verdun campaign.

Brigadier Draper when he retired in 1998 was the last serving officer to have been commissioned into the regiment.

He said: “Soldiers from the Ox and Bucks were involved in the Somme but none of them, to my knowledge, took part in the fighting on the first day when so many men died.”

Commemorations are now being prepared to mark the Battle of the Somme in 1916 and Terry Roper, chairman of the Oxford branch of the Royal Green Jackets Association, said a special Turning the Pages ceremony was being planned.

Turning the Pages ceremonies are held several times a year, at the regimental chapel at Christ Church Cathedral in Oxford, when the names of soldiers from the Ox and Bucks Light Infantry, and the Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars, who died in the First World War and Second World War, are read out.

Mr Roper added: “We were hoping to hold a ceremony on July 1 but that wasn’t possible so it is now expected to take place in September and the names of soldiers who fell at the Somme will be read out.”

In a previous article Mr Berridge has written on the Battle of the Somme, he said: “When you mention the Somme most people immediately think of the disastrous first day of the battle, July 1, 1916.

“This day passed into history as the British Army’s blackest day, almost 60,000 casualties of whom over a third (19,240) dead.

“This was the day Kitchener’s volunteer ‘new army’ raised from the flood of recruits to the colours at the outbreak of war in August and September 1914 saw their first, and for many their last, major action.

“These ‘pals’ battalions were raised from members of the same town, the same street, men from the same factories who had been ‘pals’ since childhood and the heart of their communities who had all joined up together.

“These men trained together, fought together and died together on that sunny Saturday in July 1916.

“Once the full extent of the casualties were known in those towns and cities mainly from the industrial north everyone knew someone who had been killed on the Somme, devastating their families and affecting their communities for generations.

“Around Hebuterne, north of Serre, the Territorials of the 48th (South Midland) Division, were in the line that day in reserve, although not actually engaged in the initial assault.

“Apart from two Royal Warwickshire battalions attached to the 4th Division they were to have followed later on in the day had things gone well, these included the 1/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry and my great-grandfather’s own 1/1st Buckinghamshire Battalion brigaded within 145 brigade.”

During the First World War, the Ox and Bucks formed 17 battalions and 5,878 of its soldiers gave their lives.

Their memory is enshrined in the Book of Remembrance in the Regimental Chapel.

A series of military talks is taking place this year at the Soldiers of Oxfordshire Museum. Mr Draper will speak on Redcoats to Riflemen at the Park Street museum on Wednesday, April 6, at 6.45pm.