The Rev Edward Pringle, minister at the Devonshire Street Congregational Chapel from 1884, may have been a peripheral casualty of the Great War.

He had “an outstanding personality, both in the pulpit and out of it” but by 1916 it was noted he was prone to “outspoken and forceful utterances” about the war.

Later that year, aged 71, he suffered a sudden seizure and died shortly after.

“We truly believe,” wrote the secretary of the Knowle Park Congregational Mission he had helped establish, “that his sympathy for his people in their sufferings and bereavements, and his sorrow for his country, were the means of hastening his end”.