CLEMENT Bartrim, who ran a men’s outfitters in Cavendish Street, and who died aged 92 in 1988, was Keighley’s unknown Great War poet.

Called up in 1916, he had been assigned to the 4th Lincoln Labour Company in France, where he unloaded coal trucks, dug trenches and made roads, gun positions, dumps and hangers.

He was no Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon, yet he recorded his experiences at the time with disarming simplicity in 100 poems, all but 26 of which he casually ditched in a “clear-out” in 1929.

“This, I feel, is the true voice of the other ranker,” commented a spokesman for the Imperial War Museum, to which his surviving manuscripts were sent after his death, “the concentration of the daily events, rather than generalisations about the purpose and nature of war”:

“We have a billet and a barn,

The cutest billet in the town.

The Rue de Four our billet is,

With straw as sweet as softest down.

“Although at times the rain drips in

And rats jump down on to your bed.

From off the loft where turnips lie

And lie and dye the raftings red....”