THIS earnest young man was Wilson Midgley (1887-1954), a distinguished journalist and old boy of the Keighley Trade and Grammar School. He is probably sitting at his desk in either the Manchester or London office of the Daily News, or possibly even in New York where he was correspondent from 1924 to 1929.

Illness later forced his resignation as deputy editor of the London Star, but for ten years from 1943 he edited John O' London's Weekly destined, like his newspapers, to disappear from the media scene.

Yet his reputation survives tenuously through his books. In 1946, drawing on his experience in "a bargain-price bed in a general ward". Wilson Midgley wrote From My Corner Bed, considered by the Radio Doctor (then a familiar voice in every household) to be "a grand book – vivid, discerning, personal, and, above all, human".

In 1948 he published Cookery for Men Only, a remarkably practical guide enlivened by humour. He also broadcast as a book reviewer and in 1951 contributed a talk on The Festival of my Reading to Keighley's Festival of Britain celebrations.