Huge numbers of soldiers suffering from shell shock as a result of the war were admitted to public asylums and certified as pauper lunatics.
More than 40 poverty-stricken soldiers suffering from psychiatric problems as a result of the horrors of trench warfare, were admitted to Cane Hill during the course of the First World War.
Hospital records show many of the soldiers died within months.
They were buried penniless in the Cane Hill cemetery in Portnalls Road.
Public outcry over their treatment ensured they received full military funerals and were buried separately from the other asylum patients.
Once buried, they lay forgotten and their names were not included on the Debt of Honour.
In 1981 the Portnalls Road cemetery was cleared to make way for a housing development.
During the careful exhumation of more than 3,000 bodies, no distinction was made between the soldiers’ remains and those of ordinary patients.
They were moved to Croydon Cemetery where they were cremated and their ashes scattered over Location 1,000 within the Garden of Remembrance.
For three decades the patients of Cane Hill lay in an unmarked grave.
Earlier this year Croydon Council had a headstone erected to remember the patients of Cane Hill, but there is no mention of the fact that humble soldiers lie in the grave.
Mr Falks said: “It is chastening to think that unlike the other 1.7million British war dead, whose memory is honoured by the church and state every Armistice Day, the names of these men have not been remembered or commemorated since they were interred, over 80 years ago.”
The Forgotten Heroes
Robert Thomas
Robert John Gibbons
Ralph Henry Hutcheson
Richard Leonard Skinner
John George Groombridge
William Edgar Agar
Charles William F Fray, 32
William Penny, 27
Alfred Cartwright, 36
Samuel Davis, 37
Leonard Dobson, 24
George John Lammie
John Bugden Albert Chapman
John Benjamin Delan (or Delon)
Burt Harvey George
Charles Laurence Alexander
John McKenzie
William Penny
Paul Frant
Walter William Sutton
George Robert Tullick
Samuel Schoolenart, 30
Albert Henry Wilson, 26
Nelson Giles, 31
James Charmont
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