It took a six-year campaign to have Kitty Trevelyan honoured on the war memorial in the Dartmoor village where she grew up. Now six months after her name was added it is having to be removed again.
Kitty, the daughter of an army captain, was 19 when she died in a hospital on the western front in the First World War after contracting pneumonia while working as a volunteer in a field kitchen feeding British troops.
Her name was added in February to the list on the granite slab in the village of Meavy, where she is remembered as a heroine.
However, objections from the War Memorial Trust and a local resident that it was not in keeping with the others on the grade II listed memorial mean that it will have to be chiselled off.
Sue Robinson from Newlyn, Cornwall, founder of the charity Wenches in Trenches, spent six years researching Kitty’s story and paid for her name to be added in time to mark the centenary of her death.
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She discovered that Kitty, who is buried in the Commonwealth war cemetery at Wimereux in the Pas de Calais, was the only one on the Meavy church memorial roll not commemorated on the stone.
Mrs Robinson said: “When we started to research Kitty we discovered that she had been left off the war memorial in Meavy for whatever reason. Probably because she was a woman.”
A spokesman for Burrator parish council said it had been suggested “that the use of the family name ‘Kitty’ is inappropriate and the full name Armorel Trevelyan should be used”.
He added: “It is regrettable that the national park is insisting that the lettering is removed but there is nothing the parish council can do in the light of the objections.”
A spokesman for the park authority said: “Dartmoor national park authority has no objections to the principle of her name being added to the war memorial or commemorated in another suitable and appropriate way, but as the memorial has statutory protection permission should have been sought before this was done.”