THE GRAVES Registration Commission – precursor of the Imperial War Graves Commission – was established in 1915, marking the resting-places of the known Great War dead originally with a wooden cross.

This was the grave of a Keighley soldier, Private Percy Land of the Green Howards, who died of wounds at the 2nd Australian General Hospital at Boulogne in 1917, aged 28.

He had been a leading light at Knowle Park Congregational Mission at the bottom of Fell Lane, having been a Sunday School teacher and superintendent, choir member and secretary of both the local Christian Endeavour and London Missionary Society.

A chaplain who attended him wrote to the Knowle Park Mission secretary, “His fine Christian character showed itself in his calmness, and lack of all fear, still more in his few words to me; he will be a great loss to your church! I am sorry such men as these pass from us, but it is such men who are the leaven of our battalions.”