Friday 2nd April 1915

Pte. Matthew Best, who had been one of the Keighley volunteers who had joined Tunstill’s Company in September 1914, was appointed unpaid Lance Corporal. Matthew Best had enlisted at the age of 35. He was a married man with seven children (the eldest of whom was 14) and the family had been living for some years in Keighley, where Matthew had been working as a stonemason’s labourer. Life could not have been easy for the Best family and indeed, at the time of the 1911 census three of the children had been noted as inmates at the Keighley and Bingley Joint Hospital and Sanitorium, at Morton Banks, near Keighley.

2Lt. Robert Stewart Skinner Ingram (see 5^th February) departed on four days’ leave, returning to his family home in Wimbledon.