PLANS have been unveiled by The Royal Anglians for a Regimental Memorial to commemorate the 69 soldiers killed on duty since the Regiment was formed. This will include the 13 soldiers who have died in the past two years on duty in Iraq, Afghanistan, Germany and the UK, including Cpl Darren Bonner, whose grandmother lives in Martham.

PLANS have been unveiled by The Royal Anglians for a Regimental Memorial to commemorate the 69 soldiers killed on duty since the Regiment was formed.

This will include the 13 soldiers who have died in the past two years on duty in Iraq, Afghanistan, Germany and the UK, including Cpl Darren Bonner, whose grandmother lives in Martham. Darren was one of nine soldiers killed while fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan.

In January, The Royal Anglians will exercise their right of Freedom of the Borough in Great Yarmouth.

The memorial, costing around £150,000, and to be built at The Imperial War Museum in Duxford, will stand close to the Regimental Museum, also located at Duxford, in which the story of the conflicts behind the soldiers' sacrifice will be narrated using new IT displays.

The selected sculptor, Ian Rank-Broadley, was responsible for many of the bronze statues at the National Memorial in Staffordshire. He has been commissioned to produce the Memorial's central figure of a Royal Anglian soldier, at war, in bronze.

The Architect is Stephen Oliver of Rodney Melville & Partners, Leamington Spa, and the masonry work will be carried out by Fairhaven and Woods of Anglesey Abbey, Cambridgeshire.

Local stone, quarried from the Regiment's Home Counties, will be used extensively in the memorial's construction which, it is hoped, will be completed in late 2009.

To date the three Royal Anglian battalions have raised around £100,000 of the memorial's cost, the majority by public donations. The balance costs of around £40,000, together with planned museum improvements, are the object of a separate £250,000 Museum Appeal by the Regiment. This was launched last March and so far over £70,000 has been raised.

Details of the Museum Appeal can be found online at www.royalanglianmuseum.org.uk