A PENSIONER has told of her amazement after letters written by her father from a prisoner of war camp 91 years ago were discovered in a museum cupboard.

Margaret Walmsley, 79, of Marlton Road, in the Infirmary area of Blackburn, read about the letters discovery in a piece in the Lancashire Telegraph on Remembrance Day.

It detailed the correspondence from Corporal Charles Hoole to the Blackburn Prisoner of War Relief Committee, which sent food to help starving prisoners survive.

Realising it was her father, Mrs Walmsley contacted Blackburn Museum and has now been to see the letters for herself.

Mrs Walmsley said: “It was amazing to see the letters. When I saw his handwriting it was emotional. I have seen bits of it before, but not a lot.”

The letters were found by work experience student Thomas Irwin, 16. He made the discovery after being asked to do simple data entry work on a bag of material that had been sat in a cupboard for years.

It actually contained POW letters from around 100 people. The find was hailed as the largest collection of its type in the country.

Mr Hoole, who was born in 1895, worked at the Chris Holding’s foundry in Bank Top before joining the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment for the war effort.

He was captured early on in the war and forced to work on a farm in Scheveningen, a seaside town in Holland.

While there he was bayoneted by a guard and, after recovering in hospital, was made to work as an orderly, his daughter said.

His letters from 1918 detail how one night he discovered that a fellow English prisoner had been murdered by a group of Germans.

Mrs Walmsley said: “He didn’t talk much about his time in the war and we never knew anything about this murder. He did say though a few of the local girls took a shine to him but he had to tell them ‘no way’, he had a girl back home.”

Mr Hoole married his wife Margaret a few months after returning home in early 1919.

They had five children – Harry, Ellen, Edna, Margaret and Charles and lived in Havelock Street and Russell Street.

In the Second World War he worked as a special policeman in the Blackburn area.

In 1941 he collapsed after turning up for duty in Brownhill and that night died of a kidney problem aged 45.

Mrs Walmsley said: “He was such a clever man. He could turn his hand to anything.”