Son finally found his fallen father's grave - 77 years after his death

IN THIS week's Through the Years series, the SNJ looks back at how the son of a soldier killed on the battlefields of France achieved a lifetime’s ambition and found his father’s grave – 77 years after his death.

Horace Earle, from Lightpill, was only two-months-old when Private Edward Earle died fighting in the Battle of Marne.

Half a century after he himself completed six years of gruelling service in the Second World War, Horace finally got to visit his father’s resting place.

“A little tear came on my cheek over which I had no control,” he told the SNJ in 1995.

“Just after the First World War my mother knew of a location she could have visited, but she could not afford it, and I tried with organisations and was told it was not viable to take me there.”

His mother had been told the grave could be found at Chichey, but the bodies were all moved to centralised cemeteries.

After five years of inquiries and frustration, Horace was finally given information from the War Graves Commission which led him to his father in Terlinkthun, north-east France.

Edward Earle, whose name appears on the roll of honour in St Laurence Church, Stroud, was fighting with the Warwickshire regiment when he ‘died of wounds’ at Marne, just five months before the end of the First World War.