Allan Tordoff was a blunt, down-to-earth, hard-working Yorkshireman.

So when his eldest daughter stumbled across poems on the Second World War, she was amazed to find they were her father's.

Eighteen years after his death, she now hopes to publish his work for the first time.

Barbara Moore, 68, of Wrose, uncovered the verses and her father's autobiography after her mother handed her some papers for safekeeping.

Typed and handwritten, they relive his years in Bradford and service overseas, from tales in Yorkshire dialect to carnage on the battlefield.

"Mum had all the papers in a box and when she was moving house, she asked me to look after them. I went through the box and found an envelope full of poems." said Mrs Moore. "I didn't know anything about them.

"As a father he was very strict and was a typical sergeant major - he called a spade a spade. He was a lance corporal in the second world war and went out to France and got chased back. He was left on the beaches waiting to come home. The only thing he brought back was a bugle - he never mentioned the war."

Born in Girlington in 1912, Mr Moore worked in Bradford woolhouses and joined the West Yorkshire Light Infantry Territorial Army. When war broke out, he was quick to enlist with the Royal Engineers and became an expert in laying mines.

But although he rarely fought on the front line, his poignant poems tell of friends blown to pieces and dead civilians strewn across his path. His autobiography, called The Bradford Lad, also recounts a host of narrow escapes and bewilderment as young, inexperienced lads went off to war. His frank account of growing up in poverty reflects the history of Bradford, from boxing booths at Manningham Fair to tragic accidents in mills.

Mrs Moore said she had spent two years transferring his story on to a CD-ROM and is now appealing for help to publish his autobiography and poems.

She said: "I don't think he showed his poems to anybody. He started writing his autobiography about six years before he died. He'd written his grandfather's life story - who was known as Clogger Jack of Allerton - and decided to do his own. He typed it up, but never got round to publishing it before he died of cancer. I knew he wanted it publishing and I think he would be pleased if I could." Allan went on to become a market trader in Shipley.

His wife Nellie, lives with her youngest daughter.