Sitting opposite each other in the St Symphorien military cemetery, just south-east of Mons in Belgium, are the gravestones of the first and last British soldiers to be killed in the first world war.

The proximity of the graves of Private John Parr, killed 17 days after Britain declared war, and Private George Ellison, who died 90 minutes before the armistice, is said to be a coincidence – a consequence of the fact that Mons was lost to the Germans at the opening of the war and regained at the very end.

Parr was born in 1898 in Barnet and grew up in North Finchley, in London. He took a job as a golf caddy upon leaving school and joined the army at the age of 14 – five years younger than the legal age to fight at the time.

There are no photos of Parr. His niece told the BBC that he was 5ft 3ins, with brown hair and brown eyes. Parr became a reconnaissance cyclist – a soldier who rode ahead to gather information on the advancing enemy – with the Middlesex Regiment.

In August 1914, Parr's battalion was stationed in the village of Bettignies, in northern France. Historians disagree about the cause of his death, but the most common account is that Parr was sent to find a missing unit and was killed by rifle fire on 21 August after encountering a German cavalry patrol.

His body was never identified. His mother wrote to Parr's regiment repeatedly over the following years, asking to be informed of her son's fate, but she received no information. The age given on Parr's gravestone is 20. He was actually 17.

Ellison, of Royal Irish Lancers, was killed at 9.30am on 11 November 1918, shot while out on a patrol on the outskirts of Mons. He was from Leeds and had been a member of the army as a younger man before leaving to marry Hannah Maria Burgan and to become a coalminer.

He was recalled to the army shortly before the outbreak of the war and survived the battles of Mons, Ypres, Armentieres, Loos, Bassée, Lens and Cambrai. The age stated on his gravestone is 40.

He was survived by his widow and his then four-year-old son, James Cornelius Ellison. There is one surviving photograph of Ellison, printed in a newspaper at the time of his death.