NORMAN Haggas was in the thick of the action of March 24, 1918 as he and his comrades fought off three German assaults.

One of his friends said the 39-year-old Keighley man fought “splendidly” in the midst of the unsuccessful evening attacks.

Private Haggas and the rest of D Company well deserved a rest, and the next morning around 25 of them set off for a supposedly safer location behind the lines.

But while the soldiers were walking through the village of Rosieres-en’Santerre the Germans fired some long-range shells.

Norman was killed by the shell, and his friend knocked unconscious, in this unfortunate incident only months before the end of the First World War.

Norman was born in Keighley in 1887, growing up in Devonshire Street and attending the nearby Keighley Boys Grammar School.

By the age of 23 he was an assistant manager with Halifax worsted spinner Baldwin’s.

He enlisted in the York and Lancaster Regiment in Easter 1917 but was transferred to the 2nd Middlesex Regiment before being sent to France only three months later.

The Rosierres was the scene of heavy fighting between the French and German armies soon after the war started, and came within the British lines in February 1917. There was more heavy fighting in the days following Norman’s death.