A crowd of Burnham residents gathered together to commemorate 100 years since the death of the town’s first soldier to be killed in the First World War.

Rifleman Gordon Alfred Hawkes was the first of 90 men from Burnham to be killed in the war, just a month after landing in France.

At the outbreak of war, Gordon was mobilised as a reservist and went to France with the 1st Battalion, the Kings Royal Rifle Corps.

He was killed in action just four days after his 24th birthday.

Mayor Ron Pratt opened the commemoration at the town’s war memorial with a reading, before the first of 97 crosses remembering the town’s fallen was laid alongside wreaths in memory of Private Hawkes on behalf of his family and the people of Burnham.