The bearded gentleman in the centre of this group was the Keighley-born poet and playwright Gordon Bottomley.

He was being conferred with an honorary Doctor of Letters at the University of Leeds in 1944.

Professor Dobree introduced him at the ceremony as “a distinguished Yorkshireman, a courageous dramatist and a disciplined lyrical poet,” although Bottomley, aged 70 at the time, described himself more humorously in a family letter as “never so beautiful” as he appears on this photograph.

He thought he had “an air of Sir Thomas More or old William Cecil the First or a Holbein portrait”.

Plagued by a defective lung, Gordon Bottomley had left smoky Keighley at 18 to live on Morecambe Bay, but he remained ever grateful for his education at the Keighley Trade and Grammar School.

His plays, ranging from the romantic to the innovative, are seldom if ever performed now. His possibly best known because it was the most anthologised poem, To Iron Founders and Others, was written in 1908, before environmental concerns had become fashionable. He died in 1948, aged 74.

There is a blue plaque to his memory at the site of his Keighley birthplace, on the corner of Cavendish Street and North Queen Street.