HAWORTH woman Elizabeth Garthwaite saw both her husband and eldest son go off to fight in the First World War.

Husband James was 38 when he was killed in action with the West Riding Regiment during the Arras offensive in France in 1917.

But the couple’s son, also called James, survived his service with the Royal Navy and lived until 1973.

James senior was born in 1879 in Marrick, in the North Riding of Yorkshire, and grew up in Keighley and Haworth before marrying Elizabeth Heap in 1899.

By 1911, James was 32, with four sons, including James, and two daughters, and four years later he enlisted in the army in Skipton.

It was another two years, in January 1917, before he travelled to France with the British Expeditionary Force. Four months later he was posted being posted missing with 87 other men.

Eleven months later the army officially reported James as dead. He has no known grave but is remembered on the Arras Memorial at the Faubourg-D’Amiens Cemetery.

The cemetery contains more than 2,650 Commonwealth burials from the First World War, and the adjacent Arras Memorial commemorates almost 35,000 servicemen who died in the Arras sector between 1916 and 1918 but had no known grave.