LEWIS Abraham Roper’s father died several months before he was born and his mother died early in 1914.

So it was Lewis’s sister who in 1916 had to be informed by the Army that he had died at a military hospital in France after contracting dysentery.

The 19-year-old private with the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment had been serving in the trenches at Thiepval since arriving in France in February 1916. By September he had fallen sick and was transferred up the casualty evacuation chain to one of the large military hospitals built around the small fishing port of Etaples.

During the First World War, Etaples became the scene of immense concentrations of Commonwealth reinforcement camps as well as the hospitals. It was remote from attack, but accessible by railway from both the northern and southern battlefields.

At its peak, 100,000 troops were housed there, and the 16 hospitals could deal with 22,000 wounded or sick.

Lewis was born in 1897 and grew up in Mill Hey, Haworth, working at the village’s Bridgehouse Mills while his mother worked as a fruiterer. Two of Lewis’s brothers served in the Royal Navy, while another spent the First World War doing munition work.