JOHN Nicholson Dobie was nearly 50 when hostilities broke out but he knew he had skills to offer the war effort.

He had been a doctor in Keighley for several years and treated Keighley police officers injured during the Keighley Riots of 1914.

The following year he joined the Keighley Volunteers and in 1916 became a captain, then a major, in the Royal Army Medical Corps.

He worked as a surgeon and physician at the Keighley War Hospitals for the rest of the war, helping treat the 13,214 soldier patients who came through the doors over three years .

The hospital was renowned for its trailblazing work and American Red Cross surgeons visited to see demonstrations and hear clinical discourses by John and his colleagues on the “more interesting and obscure results of modern warfare”.

John was born in 1866 in Westmorland and by the age of four was living in Keighley where his father was a GP.

John himself became a medical student at Cambridge University, marrying Laura Sargent in 1893 and moved to Keighley to become a medical practitioner.

Laura died in 1906, and the following year he married Gretta Tomkins. He had a daughter with each wife.