THE recent 90th anniversary of the start of the First World War prompted a reader to send in this picture of her uncle, Albert Blick.

Albert was born and bred in Studley before he went off to war, presumably as part of the Warwickshire Regiment. He was wounded and had to have his leg amputated.

Later he married Ivy Haynes and found a job at Alkaline Batteries in Union Street, Redditch.

He died from cancer in 1958.

The pictures were sent in by Lynette Wadlow, of Birmingham Road, Redditch, who is also a poet.

Mrs Wadlow reads her poetry every week at the end of the Friday morning show on BBC Hereford and Worcester.

She wrote one about her uncle and the First World War called A Soldier's Love.

But she also wondered if any readers knew either the Blick or Haynes families.

Upon a little rustic bridge a soldier bade farewell

As he set off to the trenches, into the very jaws of hell,

Of course Albert Blick knew nothing of the horrors he would face,

He thought only of his Ivy, of that hour, that special place.

Of the bloodshed and the slaughter Albert found he could not write,

Of the carnage wrought in Flanders Fields, of the war he went to fight

He came back as a hero, an honour he denied,

Thinking always of his comrades, the boyhood friends who died.

Albert lived only for his loved ones, the sweetheart whom he wed

When battles had all ceased to be, but deep inside his head

Was held the memory of a foreign field that would forever stay

For old soldiers never die, it seems, they simply fade away.

A hardback book, Redditch at War, by historians Alan Foxall and Ray Saunders, is on sale in the Redditch Advertiser offices in Church Green East.