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Ex-Services Home Mess (Sheffield) is a registered charity,which has been in existence since 2014.

Its trustees feel that they can provide additional and more direct services, and support for its members, while also working well with other established charities like The Royal British Legion and Mind.

The group offers relaxed and informal help for ex-service personnel to access comradeship and advice, within Sheffield.

Members of Home Mess and Royal British Legion

The Home Mess is based at Farm Road Sports and Social Club where they have a dedicated veterans room and meets on the third Monday of every month.

The mess has now set out ambitious plans to locate as many as the estimated 6,000 ex service personnel living in the Sheffield area.

Anthony Cooper said: “We’ve always wanted to know how many ex-service personnel are living in Sheffield, no one seems to know.”

Anthony believes that their records of personnel who have recently left the forces, but this only goes back so far, so misses the vast majority.

The Countess of Wessex with designer Harry Parkes (right) and Joe Taylor Chairman of Memorial Committee after unveiling a memorial at the National Arboretum Centre, Alrewas, Staffordshire
in honour of the Bevin Boys to remember the thousands of men who worked in British coal mines during the Second World War. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Tuesday May 7, 2013. See PA story MEMORIAL Bevin. Photo credit should read: Rui Vieira/PA Wire — The Countess of Wessex with designer Harry Parkes (right) and Joe Taylor Chairman of Memorial Committee after unveiling a memorial at the National Arboretum Centre, Alrewas, Staffordshire in honour of the Bevin Boys to remember the thousands of men who worked in British coal mines during the Second World War. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Tuesday May 7, 2013. See PA story MEMORIAL Bevin. Photo credit should read: Rui Vieira/PA Wire

“We’ve got a lot of ex-personnel living in Sheffield, best estimate is between 4,000 and 6,000.

“Talking to the Joint Service Council over the past few months we’ve worked out we can probably account for something like a thousand.

“So we’ve got between 3,000 and 5,000 ex-service personnel, we don’t know about. Those are the ones we tend to call ‘the forgotten, the unknowns’.

“We do what we can to support people who came out of the services, to point them in the right direction, for information, and advice, give them a place to talk, talk to people from the same background,” said Anthony.

Home Mess Sheffield wants to devise a method where the “unknown” people can contact them.

“It’s not for any ulterior motive but just to let them know we are here,” said Tony

The charity has also set out plans to take as many interested veterans to the National Arboretum.

“What we’d like to do is organise a series of trips down to the National Arboretum, which is the holy grail as far as we’re concerned,” said Anthony.

Home mess has a Facebook page and website, and would like to hear from as many veterans as possible. For more information, go to

localgiving.org/charity/home-mess/ or sheffieldexservicesmess.co.uk

Sheffield Armed Forces charity with big ambitions