While looking at photographs of Bradford’s First World War hero Sam Meekosha VC in the Friday edition of the Bradford Weekly Telegraph on January 28, 1916, what should I stumble upon but an interview with legendary actress Sarah Bernhardt.

The 71-year-old tragedian, whose personal life seems to have been far more dramatic and astonishing than anything she played in on stage, was appearing at Bradford’s impresario Francis Laidler’s new theatre, the Alhambra.

The ‘playlet’ was a production of “a thrilling patriotic drama” called Du Theatre au Champ D’ Honneur, roughly theatre on the field of honour.

The man who wrote the article, W Fieldsend, said the play “provides her with an opportunity for that declamatory power which quickens the heart. The scene is a battlefield, on which lies Mars Bertrand, a young French officer wounded in the breast and leg. An English officer appears who recognises him as an actor.”

This English officer is none other than Sarah Bernhardt. She was famous for playing men on stage. One of her roles in New York was Judas. Apart from her age, the other amazing thing about the Paris-born thespian was that she only had one leg.

In 1905 she had injured her right leg leaping from a parapet in a production of La Tosca in Rio de Janeiro. The leg failed to heal properly with the result that ten years later it had to be amputated. She didn’t let a little thing like that stop her career.

She told Fieldsend that though she spent ten months of the year without any outdoor life whatsoever, when she did venture out she liked to walk two to three miles, play lawn tennis for three hours at a time or go hunting or fishing.

“I eat little and often. I forget the hour of meals. I am never in bed before 3 o’clock in the morning. I never rise before ten o’clock,” she said.

She also told Fieldsend that she often stood for eight hours together, “never finding a minute to sit”.

True or not – and one man who knew her said she was an inveterate liar – the Alhambra play, reportedly written by an anonymous gay French officer, ends with Bernhardt and the dying Mars Bertrand reciting the Prayer For Our Enemies, with the refrain: ‘Father, forgive them not; for they know what they do.’ Two years into the war, with the horrors of the Somme and Passchendaele still to come, that may have been a popular sentiment.