As the nation this week remembers its war dead, the moment was particularly poignant for one young teenager.

Oliver Joe Cole, from Leybourne, is 15, the same age as his great-great-uncle was when he was killed by a shell in Flanders during the First World War - so becoming Britain’s youngest soldier to die in the conflict.

Valentine Joe Strudwick, or just Joe as he preferred to be called, was born on Valentine’s Day 1900. Lying about his age, he joined the 8th Rifle Brigade aged 14 years and 11 months and became one of the youngest serving soldiers.

With only six weeks of training, he was sent to France and within a couple of months he lost both of his friends who were killed while standing next to him.

After being gassed, he was sent home and spent three months in hospital in Sheerness. On recovery, he rejoined his regiment in France, but was killed on January 14, 1916.

Earlier this year, Oliver had a chance to visit his ancestor’s gravestone in Essex Farm War Cemetery near Ypres, in Belgium, while on a school trip to the battlefields with Oakwood Park Grammar School, Maidstone.

Oliver said it was a moving experience, and he was surprised to see how many other people were in the cemetery looking at the final resting place of his relative, the uncle of his father’s grandmother.

He said: “It’s incredible to think he was just my age. I came here on a school trip. He came here to go to war.”

It was the first time Oliver had seen the grave, and he admitted that previously he had known very little about the soldier.

He said: “I felt proud to have a man - a boy - like that in my family.”

Oliver is pictured recalling his relative as fellow pupil Matt Sweeting sounded the Last Post during Oakwood’s remembrance festivities.

The battlefield where Rifleman Strudwick was killed was the same as that which inspired Canadian medical officer John McCrae to pen the poem “In Flanders Fields”. The poem, which remarked on the poppies growing among the rows of war graves, gave rise to the poppy as the universal symbol of remembrance.