OXENHOPE soldier Thomas Garforth was on sentry duty on the Western Front on the night of October 9, 1917.

As he patrolled the ‘firing line’ he may have believed the greatest danger was a frontal assault from the German troops in the trenches across No Man’s Land.

Or perhaps there was a sniper, hiding from the autumn moon and searching for the light of a British soldier’s cigarette to aim by.

But for 36-year-old Thomas, a private with the West Riding Regiment, the real danger came from above.

He was killed that night by the explosion of an enemy shell during an artillery bombardment.

Thomas had been born in 1880 and grew up in Cross Roads.

By the age of 20 Thomas and his two brothers had followed in their father’s footsteps to become stone dressers at a local quarry, and their sister had followed their mother into the textile trade.

Walker

Thomas married Annie Somers Longworth in 1909, moving to Back Leeming, and two years later he was working as an electrical engineering labourer. The couple’s son Norman was born in 1912 but died soon afterwards.

Thomas, who enlisted in the Army in Haworth in 1916, is remembered on the Oxenhope War Memorial.