Very few families in the country weren’t affected in some way during the First World War.

One Folkestone family epitomises the heartache suffered by millions.

William and Rosa Orchard lived in Radnor Park Road and had four sons and three daughters.

By 1915 all four of the sons – Will, Arthur, George and Tom – and their father William, 50, who said he was six years younger to join the Canadian Army, had signed up.

Tragedy first struck the family in June 22, 1917 when eldest son Will, who was 30 and a private in the Royal West Kents, was killed by shrapnel.

That September, youngest son Tom wrote to his brother Arthur urging him to write to their mother telling him “I shall be home in October”.

Two days later Tom – a Royal Navy telegraphist – drowned when his ship HMS Contest was torpedoed just a month before his 18th birthday.

Spirits were raised when sister Lill was getting married in March 1918. George, who was a Lance Corporal in the Royal West Surrey Regiment, wrote to Arthur, a bandsman in the 1/4th East Kent Regiment, saying he would not be able to make it home.

Within six weeks George was killed on his 28th birthday on April 26, 1918.

A despairing Rosa wrote to her only remaining son, Arthur, on May 23: “My Dear and only boy I have left to me now will please God spare you and come back. Poor dear George has been killed on his birthday it’s all too terrible. I can’t bear it. He wrote me the same day as he must have been killed oh what have I done to have all this... please God spare you from this terrible wicked war.”

Arthur returned home before getting married in 1920 and having his own family. He died in 1975. Rosa died broken-hearted just six years after the end of the war, aged 56. She was survived by William who died, aged 66, in 1931.

See more of Kent family stories during the First World War at the Kent History and Library Centre in Maidstone until the end of the month at Kent County Council’s exhibition – In Their Own Words: Voices of the First World War.