A FIRST World War tale that would put many spy thrillers to shame was shared by one family at a roadshow event in 2016.

Chelford man Pte Abraham Street, of the 14th Bn Cheshire Regiment, died aged 30 in May of 1916, apparently poisoned by a German spy working as a doctor.

Here, the remarkable story, passed down the generations, is recalled by his great niece Sylvia Baguette and award-winning volunteer and First World War researched Nigel Meyrick.

He enlisted in 1916 and was sent to train at Prees Health Camp, Shropshire. Prior to being sent to the front he was inoculated.

More than 100 men had the inoculation, but they had been injected with ‘spotted fever’, and the doctor who gave them the injection was a German.

Abraham died on May 6, 1916. His family were not allowed near him whilst he was in the isolation ward at Sealand Road, Chester.

At his funeral the coffin was sent to the train station to be collected by the undertakers. When it arrived it had the wrong name on it.

The coffin was taken away and supposedly the next day the correct one brought to the church. It is not known if Abraham was indeed in that coffin.

In the 1930s Lillian Street, Abraham’s niece who was working at Ferranti at the time, overheard a conversation about the last war.

A woman was talking about her uncle being injected and killed by a German doctor. Lillian could not believe it, she then told the lady that the same thing had happened to her uncle Abraham.

In the late 1940s Lillian was returning to Manchester from a funeral in Chester with her husband, William Lomas. A cousin by marriage of William’s, Thomas Dutton, was travelling with them. The conversation then turned to wartime experiences and strange incidents in the last war.

The cousin relayed a story that when he was a sergeant in the First World War, he and another soldier had escorted a prisoner to the Tower of London on a train from Chester.

They were not allowed to talk to the prisoner. When they handed the prisoner over he was taken away and shot.

When they asked the officer in charge what the prisoner had done, they were told he was a German doctor who had been poisoning soldiers and killed many before he was caught.

Lillian then told Thomas Dutton about her relative Abraham. A few German spies were shot at the Tower of London, but to this day the incident has not been verified and remains a mystery.

n Spotted fever was a name given to a group of diseases that presented on the skin. The name spotted fever was also incorrectly applied to typhus.