A HERO from the First World War has been honoured 100 years to the day after he received the Victoria Cross, with the unveiling of a plaque at the Odiham War Memorial.

Reverend William Addison got his medal in what is now Iraq, braving machine gun fire to rescue wound comrades. On the centenary last Saturday, his great grandchildren were among those who gathered for the unveiling ceremony.

Rev Addison volunteered for the Army Chaplain’s Department at the outbreak of the war. He found himself in the thick of a disastrous campaign to relieve a besieged British garrison in the city of Kut in what was then known as Mesapotamia.

A contemporary document described what happened: “Rev William Robert Fountaine Addison VC won this honour for carrying a wounded man to the cover of a trench, and assisting several others to the same cover, after binding up their wounds under heavy rifle and machine gun fire. In addition, he encouraged the stretcher-bearers to go forward under heavy fire and collect the wounded.”

Last Saturday’s ceremony was held by Reverend Catherine Gillham, Chaplain to the Forces. Lord Lieutenant of Hampshire, Nigel Atkinson, unveiled the new memorial.

Born on September 16, 1883, in North Warnborough, Rev Addison went to Robert May’s School in Odiham – now the site of Mayhill Junior School. After surviving the war, he remained in the Army, serving in Malta, Khartoum and Shanghai, as well as numerous bases in England.

Although he subsequently left the Army, he served again as a senior chaplain to the forces in World War II. He died in 1962 aged 78. He is remembered elsewhere in the village with a blue plaque on the house of his birth, and a portrait which hangs in the modern Robert May’s School.