A local choir is this week honouring the memory of a love-struck Huddersfield soldier who died in the First World War.

The Examiner revealed the story of how Private Henry Coulter and his sweetheart Lucy Townend, who met at the Gledholt Methodist Church, wrote to each other for two years after Henry went off to war.

He was killed in France in 1916 and it was only last year that 150 love letters that passed between the two were discovered in a house in Huddersfield and have now been published by the Huddersfield Local History Society.

The story captured the imagination of the BBC who decided to tell the couple’s story as part of its World War One At Home project in which hundreds of stories from the 1914-18 war will be told on radio, television and on line throughout the country during the year.

Henry’s name is listed on a plaque at the Gledholt Methodist Church where the 110-strong Huddersfield U3A mixed voice choir rehearses every Monday morning. And with the help of the choir the couple’s poignant story will be broadcast live on the Radio Leeds mid morning show on Thursday (Feb 27) direct from the church.

Conducted by their Musical Director, Eric Cooper, the choir will sing the hymn, I Vow To Thee My Country and Ivor Novello’s Keep The Home Fires Burning, as well as a song written about Henry and Lucy by Batley musician Jasmine Kennedy, which will be performed for the first time.

The couple’s love story which the Examiner called “a love story to delight the hardest of hearts” was first told by the paper in October and again earlier this month when pupils at a school in South West France captured the romance and tragedy of the World War One story in a project dedicated to its memory .

Henry, a tram clerk, lived in Marsh and wrote to Lucy from training camps with the 17th (Leeds) Battalion of the West Yorkshire Regiment and later from the trenches in France. Lucy, who was living in Birkby, worked in a shoe shop in Westgate, Huddersfield, almost certainly Shaw and Hallas which is still in business today, and replied with tales of home life during those dark days.

Their correspondence ended when Henry was killed, probably by a shell blast, in 1916. Lucy’s last letter to him heartbreakingly did not reach him in time and was returned to her, unopened and unread, along with some of her earlier letters which it is thought came home with his effects.

They and the letters Henry wrote to Lucy were discovered in a rusty tin box wrapped in a 1916 edition of the Examiner in an attic when the new owner of the house went to investigate the roof space.

In his letters Henry expresses his love with great intimacy, calling Lucy his “beauty” and referring to her as his future wife. The brave young soldier signed off most of his letters with the devoted, lingering, romantic words, “Yours for Eternity, Henry”.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/mediapacks/ww1athome/yorkshire.html