ROBERT BASS came from Stowmarket in Suffolk, and worked in a cordite factory.

He and several workmates joined up to fight in the First World War, and he saw action with the Surrey Regiment at the Battle of the Somme in 1916.

He was wounded, in the leg, and shipped back to England for treatment in a temporary hospital housed in Trinity College Cambridge.

He was well enough to go back the next year, to Etaples near Calais, with the Essex Regiment, and was wounded again: a shell burst near him and fragments shattered his top lip and jaw.

He came back to England again, this time to the Second Northern General Hospital at Becket Park in Headingley, where there were specialists in treating maxillofacial injuries - a skill just being developed. He had seven months of tooth extractions and surgery, and was given dentures but never settled to using them.

He met and later married Ada Pawley, then aged 16, who left her position in service in Goole to move to Leeds in search of better work and prospects. They settled in Leeds and lived there for the rest of their days.

There’s a picture of them, in old age, by which time the scars that were plain in his youth had faded, until his face was wise, kindly and full of character.

Robert’s is one of many poignant stories of the dedicated men and women who worked at Becket Park, and of the brave servicemen who were treated there; more than 500 staff and thousands of patients.

It’s drawn from Richard Wilcock’s book Stories from the War Hospital.

Many of the hospital records were destroyed routinely at the end of the First War, or lost in fires after incendiary attacks in World War Two or further damaged by the water used to put the fires out.

But there are still many stories, like Robert’s, that can be traced, and there are still the sons and daughters of those directly involved - albeit now, themselves, getting on in years - who can add living detail to the medical cards and hospital registers.

Richard was for many years a journalist and teacher, and is also the Secretary of the Headingley Literary Festival - which is how he came to be interested in the hospital.

He was the speaker at the November meeting of the Airedale Writers’ Circle, talking about the process of researching the book.

He described, too, how it was launched at the Festival in 2014 with musical and dramatic interludes derived from some of the individual stories contained in its pages, and recounted in moving and memorable detail some of the lives and loves of the people who worked or were treated there.

For some, the war was too much to bear and the endings were sad ones. For others, like Robert Bass, it was an important episode in a long, full life.

The building, handsome, imposing and externally unchanged, now forms part of Leeds Becket University.