TO misquote the First World War poet Rupert Brooke – there is some corner of a foreign field that is for ever Newcastle United.

In the little French village of Authuille, close to the Somme battlefield, every Remembrance Day a box is opened containing replica footballs and vintage shirts, including one bearing the name, Dunglinson.

Dan Dunglinson was a talented Newcastle United football player cut down in his prime.

A Hexham lad, he was on the fringe of an international call-up when England amateurs beat Germany in Berlin in 1914 and he captained the England North team at trials in Oxford.

But cruelly, just two years after that English sporting victory, he was amongst the first soldiers to fall at the Battle of the Somme.

His memory, however, is being honoured again during this centenary year thanks to the Royal British Legion, which has launched a campaign called Sport Remembers the Somme 1916-2016.

Corporal Dunglinson’s story is one of those being highlighted in a bid to inspire the nation’s professional and amateur sporting organisations and individuals to unite in remembrance.

Centre forward Dunglinson was born in Hexham in 1890 and was snapped up by the Toon following spells with Brighton West End and Blyth Spartans.

He was a promising reserves player along with team mate Tommy Goodwill. Both players joined the 16th ‘Commercials’ of the Northumberland Fusiliers and during training on Sailisbury Plain, Dunglinson helped set up and captained the battalion football team which beat Bath City 3-0 in October 1915.

The 26-year-old railway clerk was first over the top when the Newcastle Commercials attacked near Thiepval Wood on July 1, 1916. He was also one of the first to fall. Private Goodwill, just 22 and from Earsdon near Whitley Bay, was also among 350 soliders and six officers killed, about a third of the battalion. Their bodies were never found and their names are on the memoiral at Thiepval.

Dan Dunglinson had two brothers in the Commercials. William, a 2nd lieutenant, survived the Somme, but was killed in action with the 1st Battalion less than three months before the war ended.

Victor was wounded in the head and leg in June 1916, when his steel helmet saved him. He survived the war, however, ending up as captain.

There were three other Newcastle players who lost their lives in the war.

George Stephenson Rivers, of Tudhoe, County Durham, who like Dunglinson,was heading for a place in the first team, volunteered as a private in the 14th Battalion Durham Light Infantry and was killed on the Somme on September 13.

He is buried at Englebelmer Communal Cemetery, with the words, ‘Greater love hath no man that a man lay down his life for his friends’ inscribed on his grave.

The two other Newcastle players to lose their lives in the war were midfielder Richard McGough, killed in April, 1917, with the Royal Garrison Artillery, and inside forward Tom Cairns, who died six months later with the Royal Field Artillery.

In 1919, Newcastle United unveiled a memorial to their players who served in the war which can still be seen at St James’ Park, next to the atrium in the Jackie Milburn Stand.

And last year, a plaque to the Northumberland Fusiliers was unveiled at Authuille close to where so many of them fell.

Earlier this month, a Magpies team turned out in memory of another of their former players who also died on the Somme.

Harrogate-born Donald Simpson Bell, 25, was the country’s first professional footballer to enlist in the First World War and the only one to be awarded the Victoria Cross.

After playing for Newcastle, full-back Bell joined Bradford Park Avenue, from 1912 until November 1914, when he enlisted with the 9th Battalion of the Yorkshire Regiment (The Green Howards) and served on the front line in the Battle of the Somme.

Second Lieutenant Bell died after his unit came under heavy fire from a German machine gun post.

One of the few remaining members of Dan Dunglinson’s family, 91-year-old Bryan Stobart, of Budleigh Salterton, in Devon, said he felt proud to be related to our footballing hero.

Bryan, who has researched his family tree, said: “My grandmother was a Dunglinson and her brother was the father of Dan. My grandfather William Henry was a reporter on the Courant and was married to Margaret Dunglinson who was Dan’s aunt.”

“My father – also called Dan Dunglinson, and my uncle, James Henry, both served in the Northumberland Fusiliers in the 1914-18 war, both leaving the railway to do so.

“My uncle went back to his old job, but my father went to a job in London.”