This week is proving a busy one for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, 90 years old this year. Yesterday the Commission launched its web-based interactive education resource for secondary schools, The Glory Days — Football in Times of War. And on Saturday its travelling exhibition, Remembered, featuring new military-cemetery photographs by former Times staff photographer Brian Harris, opens at the Imperial War Museum North, Manchester.

As if this were not enough, your reporter added to the commission’s workload this week by bringing to its attention an isolated pair of war graves in Norfolk churchyards, which seemed to be in need of TLC. In each case, weeds were pushing up through a stone-edged apron of soil in front of the commission’s headstone, creating an air of general neglect and in one case a muddy splashback on the headstone itself. Fortunately, receipt of my report coincided with one of the commission’s inspection teams being in the area, who said it would visit both graves and see if chippings could be laid down to smother the weeds.

“We have 170,000 war graves in the UK in some 12,500 different burial grounds,” says the commission’s spokesman Peter Francis, “and many of them are single graves, like these two, in ordinary village churchyards, where for all sorts of reasons the standards of upkeep can sometimes quite suddenly deteriorate. But our regional inspection teams do go round them all on a cyclical basis. We expect a minimum standard. The headstone should be plumb (that is, upright and level), legible, clean and accessible. And the general surrounds of the grave should be neat and tidy.”

To put matters right, the commission has its own maintenance teams, but also enters into contracts with commercial companies, besides having more informal working-party arrangements with vicars, schools, army cadets and even the probation service to top up maintenance as necessary. “It is all about trying to create a sense of ownership in the community,” says Mr Francis.

“Of course, we can’t get heavy machinery into a sprawling Victorian churchyard in which our graves may well be scattered among other markers, so the scene is never going to look like one of the beautifully kept military cemeteries we have on the Continent. But we still do everything we can to ensure that the standard of maintenance at each location benefits the sacrifice of the individual buried or commemorated.”

It is good to think that the Norfolk graves of two Second World War airmen should be benefiting from this policy very soon.

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission’s web-based resource remembering sacrifices made by professional footballers in two world wars,The Glory Days — Football in Times of War is available from today at www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QfnMaXxoEQ

The exhibition Remembered: The History of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission is at the Imperial War Museum North from November 10 to March 9, 2008. Accompanying the exhibition this weekend, November 10-11, will be family history sessions with experts from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and the Imperial War Museum, and, on November 11, in the Learning Studio, there will be a programme of short films looking at remembrance processions and memorials. For further information, visit www.iwm.org.uk

For further information on the commission, visit www.cwgc.org