A fallen war hero killed in action in the Second World War has not been honoured by a council despite a 10-year campaign by his family.
Sidney Quattrucci, a rifleman of Second Battalion, Kings Royal Rifle Corps, was killed in El Alamein on November 3, 1942 at the age of 21.
For 10 years his brother William, 82, of Clockhouse, has asked Sutton Council to include his name on Carshalton war memorial or another.
But Mr Quattrucci, a former volunteer Home Guard dispatch rider who had nine other siblings serve in WWII, has faced constant obstacles and feels let down by the borough his family dedicated themselves to.
Sutton Council has told Mr Quattrucci there is no room on the war memorial for the 270 soldiers killed during WWII.
Mr Quattrucci has also been told by council officers that his brother is included in the Book of Remembrance, but he says this is barely accessible and a poor recognition of the debt owed to his brother.
Now, on the anniversary of his brother’s death, Mr Quattrucci has launched a campaign with the Sutton Guardian to see his brother and the other 269 soldiers killed in action during the Second World War properly honoured.
He said: “Our family have done so much in this community, but they treat us as though we were nothing.
“I would like to see something done before I go.”
John Kennedy, Conservative councillor for Carshalton South and Clockhouse, said: “How can you say to families that had soldiers sent abroad to be killed in action, that there isn’t enough stone to put their names on?
“The council should make room for them on the war memorials. Why should some people be honoured and others left out?”
Councillor Graham Tope, executive member for leisure and libraries on Sutton Council, said: “There is simply not enough room on our memorials to include the names of all those who died in World War II.
“In Carshalton alone this would mean adding 270 names and it is an issue of space, not money, which prevents us from including them.”
What the family did in the war
William Quattrucci, the son of Italian immigrant Giustiniano, had 14 siblings, nine of whom served in WWII and one who died aged seven.
He volunteered to be a dispatch motorbike rider during the war in which he would drive during air raids with shrapnel falling about him; he once was going to Nonsuch Park when it was bombed.
Mr Quattrucci later went on to serve in the Royal Army Ordinance Corp and later married Olga in 1947, with whom he had three children.
His brother Sidney died aged 21 while serving for the Second Battalion Kings Royal Rifle Corps in El Alamein in 1942.
The campaign in the Western Desert was fought between the Commonwealth forces, based in Egypt, and the Axis forces, based in Libya.
The battlefield, across which the fighting surged back and forth between 1940 and 1942, was the 1,000km of desert between Alexandria in Egypt and Benghazi in Libya.
El Alamein War Cemetery, where Sidney was buried, contains 7,239 Commonwealth graves from WWII.
The eldest brother of the Quattrucci family, Edward, a Red Cross medic, was the first British officer in the Bergen-Belsen Nazi concentration camp in northwestern Germany.
He later went on to marry a Polish survivor of the camp, Miss Toni Suchecks, whose father was shot dead by the Nazis and whose brother was also believed dead.
Mr Quattrucci’s father Giustiniano, also ran the Beeches Wine Store in Carshalton Beeches.
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