FIVE flags which were flown in York to mark the end of the First World War have been rediscovered a century later and gone on display at a museum.

David Harding’s great grandfather and grandfather displayed a series of flags outside their family’s former drapery shop, G.W Harding, in High Ousegate and Coppergate, on November 11, 1918.

Last month, Mr Harding found five of the flags, which represented countries of the allied forces, neatly folded in a drawer at his late mother’s house in York, and he has donated them to York’s Castle Museum, where they are on display to mark the centenary of the end of the conflict.

Mr Harding said his family was delighted the flags turned up just in time for the museum to display them on the Armistice centenary, and would then preserve them for the future. “Fate surely meant it to happen like this,” he added.

Rachael Bowers, assistant curator of social history, said it was poignant the flags had been found so close to the centenary.

“Together with the information Mr Harding has passed on to us, they offer a glimpse of how businesses in the city marked the end of the conflict 100 years ago,” she added.

The flags, which measure about three foot by six foot, are on display in the museum’s First World War exhibition, 1914: When the World Changed Forever. Mr Harding said they were all flown again to mark the end of the Second World War at the shop, now occupied by Urban Outfitters.

Meanwhile, the name of Benjamin Baines, and of five other First World War casualties - Thomas Peasgood, Thomas Edwin Eastwood, Walter Johnson, Walter Hudson and John Quigley - are to be read out on the steps of York’s Mansion House at 11am on Saturday after all being recently added to the King’s Book of York Heroes at York Minster.

The Press reported on Monday how Benjamin’s name was left out of the book after the war finished but had now been added after his great great niece, Katie Awdas, had provided evidence to the Minster that he was from York and had died in 1915.