THE proposed demolition of Memorial House in Knutsford would remove residents’ ‘right of Remembrance’, war memorial campaigner Charlotte Peters Rock said on Sunday.

Charlotte was speaking to the more than 70 people she said attended a community Remembrance event at Memorial House.

Cheshire East Council voted to approve McCarthy and Stone’s scheme for 46 retirement apartments on the Memorial House site in Northwich Road.

The scheme would see the demolition of Memorial House, a former cottage hospital built in 1922 as a First World War memorial.

However the Government is deciding whether to rule on the housing scheme’s future following an intervention by Labour Party deputy leader Tom Watson after being contacted by Charlotte.

Charlotte is leading a campaign to save the building from demolition, and told those who came to Memorial House: “In The Great War with hundreds of non-belligerent young men, doing their best for King and Country, killed and injured from Knutsford and district alone, the people of this area fought back, through their grief and poverty, around those men who returned mentally and physically injured for the rest of their lives… and did something magnificent.

“Knutsford and District War Memorial was built for ‘remembrance in perpetuity’ of those loved men who were killed, and as a way of looking after – first of all – those men who returned to a lifetime of pain and remembrance of carnage and death.

“After that, this War Memorial Cottage Hospital was also to be used by the rest of the community who had need of its service; arrangements being made at the outset that everyone, no matter their ability to pay, would be served.

“The Great War is now not within the personal memory of any of us, but still remains in the handed down family memory, to add to memories of the Second World War and all the rest.

“Yet in the proposed destruction of our Knutsford and District War Memorial, it now seems that having been used up in wars, the memory built by our community on our gifted land, of our young men, may not be allowed to stand.

“The destruction of this war memorial will remove our Right of Remembrance, right of local history, right to exist as a free people whose sons – and now daughters – are taken by the state for its own purposes.

“This war memorial of ours should be handed back to this community under a suitable Community Trust.

“The ordinary man, woman and community has a perfect right to our place in history, especially where some pay with their lives and the rest pay with their grief, care, work and money.”