The photograph below is of a 'Dead Man's Penny'. One of these bronze plaques, about 5" in diameter, was made for the family of each and every soldier, sailor, airman and member of other uniformed services (such as nurses) of the British Empire, who died on active service in a combat theatre during the First World War. Each plaque included the name of the casualty in the frame on the right hand side of the plaque.

Since the total number of British Empire fatalities was in the region of 950,000* (of which just under 750,000 were from the British Isles including Ireland) an awful lot of these memorial plaques were made and distributed around the world, from Canada and the West Indies to India and New Zealand, and points between.

Each plaque has a story to tell. Many of those individual stories are now lost entirely, or at most can only be pieced together in part, for example from information available from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. In this case the plaque commemorates Sepoy Taza Gul, a member of the (British) Indian Army. He came from the North-West Frontier Province of what is now Pakistan, and died in Iraq during an attempt to relieve British forces beseiged by the Turks at Kut al Amara in 1916. All attempts to break the seige were unsuccessful and the British at Kut were eventually forced to surrender. Taza Gul has no known grave, and is commemorated on the Basra Memorial. Ninety-one years later British soldiers are (more or less, kind of, as of early September 2007) in Basra again.

Regardless of anyone's political leanings, or opinions about the rights and wrongs of more recent events in Iraq, there are direct historical links, and arguably even causal links, between those recent events and the campaign in which Taza Gul died.

* but, believe it or not, the French suffered more fatalities than this in 1914 alone.

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