AT first glance, Robert Wearmouth seems an unlikely candidate as chaplain.

Like others in Oxhill, near Stanley, he was 12 years old when he started down the mine and in 1901, aged just 19, ran away from home to join the Northumberland Fusiliers who were recruiting soldiers to fight in the Boer War.

But after leaving the Army he joined the Primitive Methodist Church in his home village and decided to educate himself, working down the mine by day and studying at night.

Eventually, he became a minister in Grimsby and volunteered to become a chaplain at the outbreak of war.

He embarked for France in July 1915, the only United Board chaplain to minister for 22,000 men and served alongside them in the trenches, providing a listening ear, arranging services wherever possible at the Front, even playing his concertina to entertain the troops.

After the war, he published Pages From A Padre’s Diary, an account of his time in France.

In it, he wrote the following account of life as a chaplain: “For the most part the Padre’s job was diverse, difficult and dangerous.

“On occasion he had to run the Officers’ Mess, superintend the men’s canteen, sell the cakes, the tea, the Woodbines at five a penny, accompany the troops on their long marches, footslog it on the cobbled roads, be exposed to the sweltering sun or the pouring rain, grope his way through the intense darkness, live with the lads in the narrow trenches, the flimsy shelters, the battered houses, the destroyed villages, the shelter of the ridges.

“Although unarmed he sometimes went with them over the top, into the fury of the battle, not to fight, but to rescue the fallen, attend the wounded, minister to the dying, reverently bury the dead, write to their loved ones, break the sad news about wounds or death, and to comfort all who suffered or who were in distress”.

The lot of the Army chaplain was vividly expressed by DLI Chaplain Cyril Lomax, who sketched the training grounds and battlefields as the regiment made its way through France.

But, as he explained, he refused to depict the full horrors of war.

Chaplain Lomax wrote: “If I wanted to make you creep I might have put a realistic foreground of dead Bosch and our own, fallen in every sort of attitude: some half buried by shell, others in the open. But the reality is too ghastly.

“There is none of the dignity of death - the flies and rats see to that. The impression left upon one is one of waste. Indeed the whole Country would admirably do as a picture of the material conditions of Hell.

“All that is pleasant and comely and decent and comfortable has been rent and torn away: all that is sordid, and ghastly and terrible remains.

“Of course not for one moment am I speaking of the quiet heroism of our average unassuming chaps who stick it all so stolidly, I am speaking of the physical conditions of life.”