GORDON Bottomley’s literary output earned him honorary doctorates from the universities of Durham, Aberdeen and Leeds.

Here (centre) at Leeds in 1944, he was described as “a distinguished Yorkshireman, a courageous dramatist and a disciplined lyrical poet”, although in a family letter he joked about his “air of Sir Thomas More or old William Cecil the First or a Holbein portrait”.

When Keighley relatives invited him to break his journey and stay with them he declined, explaining how “industrial Airedale in near November did enough at me fifty years ago to make me still afraid of it”.

All three photographs are from the Gordon Bottomley archive in Keighley Local Studies Library.