On Friday, February 25, 1916, a two-paragraph notice appeared in the Bradford Weekly Telegraph announcing the death of Second-Lieutenant Eric A Cave of the Royal Flying Corps.

Less than a week after being sent to the Western Front he was thought to have been shot down on February 13, and “fell with his machine in his own lines”. He was 22.

This particular casualty of war may have been felt a little more keenly in the newspaper office because before hostilities Eric Arthur Cave had been a member of the literary staff of the Yorkshire Observer, the city’s daily paper.

Before coming to Bradford he had worked in the library of two papers in Northampton – the Daily Echo and the Independent. News of his death was reported in the Wellingborough News on February 18, 1916, and The Rushden Echo on March 10.

Eric Cave was not shot down, however. According to The Rushden Echo’s story, sourced from a letter by a Royal Army Medical Corps man, an officer in Cave’s 24th Squadron lost control of his aircraft while carrying out photographic reconnaissance 10,000 to 12,000ft above German lines.

So cold was the winter air at that height that the pilot was said to have become frozen numb and was unable to manoeuvre his DH2 aeroplane.

This was a single-seater aircraft, known as a “pusher” because the propeller was at the rear of the cockpit fuselage, leaving the pilot an uninterrupted field of fire in front for the 7.7mm Lewis Gun.

The rear-mounted engine reportedly made the aeroplane susceptible to stalling. Poor training didn’t equip new pilots with the skills that only experience could bring.

Perhaps for this reason the DH2 was also known as ‘The spinning Incinerator’.

Major Lanoe Hawker, VC, DSO, who commanded the 24th Squadron, wrote to Mrs Alice Cave, his mother: “Your son was a very good pilot, and handled his machine very well; unfortunately while planing down to land, about 4pm, 13 Feb, he made too steep a turn; the machine got out of control and dived to the ground before he had time to recover control again.

“Help arrived within two minutes of the accident, but there was nothing to do. Death was instantaneous; at least, he did not suffer any pain. It is very sad for us to lose a comrade by such an unlucky accident.”

When Eric Cave fell to earth it wasn’t just the death of an airman – the world of English letters also lost a promising talent.

He was an accomplished linguist in French, German and Italian and had translated some of G K Chesterton’s stories into German.

He was remembered thus by a former Northampton Daily Echo colleague: “For several months he and I shared ‘diggings’ in Northampton, and no memories are more pleasant than of our long talks then, sometimes far into the night.

“He was an omnivorous reader, and few men of his age had a wider knowledge, not only of English, but of German and French literature.

“Before joining the Echo staff, he had spent two years in Germany, and no war would have ever killed his love of German music and literature. He wrote on music with real discernment and ability.”

Eric Cave’s name is one of 20 from the First World War commemorated on the Telegraph & Argus’s war memorial in Hall Ings, Bradford.