AN exhibition featuring unique links to York’s First World War veterans has opened.

York Cemetery: World War One Commemorative Exhibition at the Castle Museum features photographs, video and historical documents to remember those who died in The Great War.

Items on display include George Henry Sykes’ Victory Medal, which was reunited with his family for last year thanks in part to an appeal in The Press, and a ceramic poppy – one of 888,246 from the Tower Of London display last year, which now belongs to cemetery genealogist Janet Lea.

Janet said the exhibition follows from the cemetery's own exhibition marking 100 years since the war broke out.

She said: “An invitation to take it to the Castle Museum was too good an opportunity to turn down.

“This is a new, really polished version of last year’s cemetery exhibition and a natural addition to the museum’s own ‘1914: When the World Changed Forever’ exhibition.”

Caroline Kennedy, another cemetery genealogist, said part of the display which was attracting most interest covered the Zeppelin raid on the city in 1916, in which nine people were killed.

She said: “People were so in awe of these huge machines and the spectacle they were creating in the darkness that they felt compelled to go outside to watch.”

Also on display is a mug which belonged to former school headmaster Edward Hope Hawthorne, who served in the Royal Naval Division.

Caroline said: “Edward was actually holding his mug when it was shot through during the Battle of Gallipoli. You can clearly see from the bullet hole in the mug that it went in one side and came out of the other.”

A video exhibit lists all 151 people buried at York Cemetery with a Commonwealth War Grave, set to photographs and music – Heroic Elegy Opus 36 by Ernest Bristow Farrar, who was killed in 1918 after two days at the front.

The exhibition runs at York Castle Museum’s Community Room until Sunday, March 1.