FOUR Keighley men were killed by the same explosion just two days after the Battle of the Somme officially ended.

Charles Lowndes, his fellow lance corporals Tatton and Scott and comrades Corporal Allsopp, fell victim to the same shell from a German trench mortar.

Sutton man Private Shackleton, another member of the West Riding Regiment’s D Company, was wounded in the forearm by shrapnel from the explosion.

For Charles’s parents Charles and Ellen’s their son’s death was a second tragedy: Charles’s brother Sam had been killed in action on the first day of the Somme four months previously.

Charles was born in Keighley in 1895 and by the age of 15 was an apprentice fitter of textile machinery.

At the age of 18, four months before war broke out, and while working for well-known Keighley firm Prince Smith and Son, Charles signed up for the West Riding Regiment’s Territorial Force.

Just before the Battle of the Somme began in July, Charles was treated for a shrapnel wound to his left arm, and in the midst of the fighting received a gunshot wound.

By September Charles was back with his unit and promoted to lance corporal, just two months before his death at the age of 21.