As boys, Richard and John Black would dress up in their grandfather’s medals and tin hat, marching up and down the garden of his Nottingham townhouse, while he laughingly put them through drills.

At night, they would watch him by the fire, picking out shrapnel splinters that - even after all those years - rose to the surface of his chest and arms.

The boys were aware he had fought in the First World War. But he largely kept his experiences on the Western Front to himself. “We knew he had been in a tank,” says John, now 74, from his home in Bedfordshire. “Although he never made anything of it.”