Wartime France at night, 1916, by Frederick Cobb - Credit: Frederick Cobb A picture of winter trees, stark against a river and tower, sketched one wartime night more than a century ago, was the inspiration for a fascinating family memoir. When Frederick Cobb rediscovered the picture he had drawn in France in 1916 he began to look back on his life – and write his memoirs. That was in the 1970s and Fred told the story of his childhood in Thorpe Hamlet, near Norwich, in the early 1900s, serving in France in the First World War, a 50-year career in the railway industry and a life-long love of local football.