More than 100 people observed a two-minute silence in the side garden of St Etheldreda's on Sunday afternoon at an open-air service to dedicate sandstone tablets.
The new tablets were inscribed by local stonemasons with the names of 113 local soldiers who died in the First World War, and four names from the Second World War who, until now, had no memorial at the church.
The original commemorative stones, completed just before Christmas 1920, were destroyed during the Blitz in 1940. Although the church itself was rebuilt in 1958, the memorial was never reinstated.
Using grainy photographs and crumpled pieces of paper handed down from vicar to vicar for 80 years, the full list of the war dead from St Eth's was compiled, and the new York stone wall slabs commissioned.
Remembering local heroes
The present vicar, Fr Ross Gunderson, led the service of dedication in the remembrance garden at the corner of Fulham Palace Road and Doneraile Street.
Clergy and parishioners, including former H&F councillor and MP Dominic Grieve, took turns to read out all the names, while the church's music director, Russell Swallow, sang and played a new composition for the occasion, Names Remembered on the Wall.
Fr Gunderson said that the creation of the new memorial tablets had provided an opportunity to research the backgrounds of the inscribed names; people who had lived in the same Fulham houses as today's parishioners. He said:
Their families waved goodbye to them from your windows, and they lived here; ordinary people in an ordinary place."
They included teenaged lads who had lied about their age so they could join up, and several sets of brothers. One man, Herbert Henry Chase, was shot at dawn for desertion, but was later given a posthumous pardon after post-traumatic stress disorder was formally recognised as a mental health condition.
Open to visitors
Fr Gunderson said that the law prevented new names being added to the war memorial, so the engraving included a final inscription to "all others of the parish, known to God, who died in conflict".
Replacing the St Eth's memorial involved a lot of paperwork and applications for permission, including obtaining a certificate of lawful development. The garden in which it now stands is accessible at all times from Doneraile Street.
A trumpeter played the Last Post and Reveille, and the service, which included the National Anthem, was followed by cake and glasses of Madeira.
Ben Coleman, MP for Chelsea & Fulham, joined parishioners to honour the war dead with the new commemorative stones.
There will be wreath-laying for the first time at the new St Eth's memorial during a Remembrance Sunday service at 10:30am on Sunday 10 November.
On the same day, there will also be open-air services at Fulham War Memorial (10:50am), and Shepherds Bush War Memorial (10:52am).
