Mabel Hunter, aged 5, stood gazing out of the window at the back of school assembly, her concentration drifting away from the sombre address being given by her head teacher.

She was vaguely aware of a list of names being read out, until suddenly the head teacher said: “. . . and Corporal Ernest Hunter.”

Every child in the hall swung round to look at her. Corporal Hunter was her father, and that day the school had been notified that he was dead, killed during the last German push at the Somme in France. It was 1917. “I couldn’t take it in. I thought, that’s my dad, then I just blacked out and sank to the floor,” the now 95-year-old Mabel Howatt recalled yesterday.

Her father had gone to war in 1916 and had managed only one trip home, which she remembers because of a ticking-off he had given to her older brother, George, after he had “borrowed” their father’s rifle to play cowboys and Indians “with a real gun”.

With Remembrance Sunday tomorrow, Mrs Howatt gathered the few photographs she has of her father and recalled the postcard the family received at their home in Bishop Auckland in Co Durham a few days before he was killed. In it he indicated his regret at scolding Mrs Howatt’s brother. “Just to let you know that I got back to my wooden hut alright and hoping George was alright when he got home!” he wrote.

Almost half a million British children lost their fathers in the 1914-18 war, many of whom were brought up by their grandmothers because their mothers had to go out to work. Some of their stories will be told in a BBC4 documentary tomorrow at 8pm by Testimony Films, called What Did You Do In the Great War, Daddy?

Mrs Howatt, who lives in Lanchester, Co Durham, told The Times: “My grandmother looked after us when my mother went out to work. It wasn’t until till nine years ago that I found out more about my father’s death. He had joined the Tyneside Irish Regiment, which turned into the Northumberland Fusiliers, and was serving in a platoon digging trenches out in France. But the Germans were nearer than anyone thought. My father was in an open field when the Germans arrived. There was heavy firing and hundreds were killed including my father. There is no grave for him but I’m told his name is on the Arras memorial.”

Gertrude Harris, 94, of Harrow, northwest London, did not discover the true story behind her father’s death until she was 40. Before then, she thought that he had been killed in a German assault. But Private Harry Farr was one of 306 soldiers executed for cowardice in the face of the enemy in the First World War, all of whom have now been pardoned.

“I was three when he died and my mother was just 21. When the letter arrived telling her that my father had been shot at dawn, she was so ashamed she put it down her blouse and never spoke about it. I grew up believing he had been killed in battle,” she told The Times. “My mother went into service and I was brought up in the house of Lord and Lady Arkwright in Hampstead. I was very lucky; they were wonderful to me.”

Charles Chilton, 90, of West Hampstead, London, never knew his father. He was one year old when his father, a private in the Sherwood Foresters, was killed at Arras in one of the heaviest German bombardments. In 1920 his mother remarried and they lived in a tiny tenament room, struggling to survive. She fell ill and died.

He was resourceful and at 15 joined the BBC gramophone department. He later wrote the play Oh What a Lovely War, with songs such as Goodbyeeand Pack Up Your Troubles. “I had no memories of my father but it was his story and the songs they used to sing in the trenches which inspired me.”

Ellen Elston, 99, of Devon, recalled: “We had a beautiful framed picture of Daddy on the wall wearing his uniform. The day Mum got the telegram saying he’d been killed, she turned it around the other way. She couldn’t bear to look at it again. I can hear her, now wandering around the house crying. I was eight and from that day on my life changed for ever.”

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