Birmingham University has a 'virtual' war memorial.

I stumbled on this, in January 2004, when I put "Hubert Hothersall" into a search engine (Google). To my amazement it came up with his name as a First World War casualty. Needless to say I fired off an email immediately, telling them that he was hale and hearty during the 1950s, and had been Mayor of Sutton Coldfield! They have since added a note to this effect.

Within a few days I was contacted by the newly appointed Professor of Modern History at the University, John Bourne. Like all good historians he did not take my assertions as gospel. He first checked the actual war memorial and found that, indeed, H Hothersall was shown as a WW1 casualty. He then checked the University Register and found that Bert had signed it in 1919, on graduation. Finally, he checked with a contact in the Public Record Office who said that Bert had been a Tank Commander.

(Tanks were, I understand, a rare commodity in WW1, which Churchill claimed to have been his invention. Churchill also claimed that they were unsuccessful because of the manner of their (mis)use. He was right, and this was proved convincingly - by the Germans - with the end of the 'Phoney' war in 1940.)

At least three other AOEs are listed, correctly, on this memorial: E N 'Toffee' Marson, L H Kay and D L Sarjeant. The web site provides for biographical contributions about each of the casualties, and there are some particularly interesting ones about the first named.