Emotional Ypres service for Oldham's WWI hero Frank

Chris Foote-Wood is pictured with Lt Col (Retd) Mike McDonald of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers

Author Chris Foote-Wood was both 'proud and sad' to dedicate a new gravestone for his great-uncle at an emotional military service in Belgium.

Second Lt Frank Wood of the Lancashire Fusiliers, who was from Oldham, was killed in Flanders on the Western Front in one of the last battles of the First World War. 

Mr Foote-Wood used his family history records to add to work by a Belgian researcher and the Ministry of Defence to identify his great-uncle who was originally buried as an 'unknown soldier'.

Mr Foote-Wood, brought up in Bury and now living in Barnard Castle in Co Durham, wrote the dedication for a new gravestone at a military cemetery near Ypres maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.

“It was a hugely emotionally experience for me to take part in a military service to honour my great uncle who was killed just six weeks before the end of WW1”, said Mr Foote-Wood.

"It is sad he so nearly survived like his elder brother, my grandfather Sgt John Wood.

“I was proud to wear the Croix de Guerre awarded to my grandad, as I do on Remembrance Day.

"The King of the Belgians decorated John in 1917 after his heroic rescue of a wounded comrade from No Man’s Land under fire during the battle of Passchendaele.

“After the service, Col Mike McDonald of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers presented me with the Union Flag used in the ceremony, which I will cherish."

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