A THREE-year search for the unmarked grave of a First World War veteran has ended in West Quantoxhead.

Church and support worker Jacquie Howell, from London, eventually traced her great-grandfather’s final resting place to a plot next to St Etheldreda’s Church, in St Audries Park.

Later this month she will unveil a graveside memorial to George John James Wall, who died from his injuries in 1927, which was too late for an official War Grave.

Mr Wall’s two surviving daughters, Monica Bridger, who is 101 years old, and Iris Thompson, aged 95, will travel to attend the service from Bournemouth and Herne Bay, respectively.

Also taking part in the service will be the Royal British Legion’s Somerset chairman Robert McDonald who lives in nearby Williton, and standard bearer John Gallop.

Mrs Howell’s cousin Yvonne Thrumble, who is a legion standard bearer in London and attended the late Queen Elizabeth’s funeral last autumn, has also been given permission to take part.

The Exhortation and Kohima will be read and a two-minute silence will be held.

Mr Wall, who served in the Leicestershire Regiment, was invalided out of the Army as an amputee in 1917 and was cared for in a military hospital in Bournemouth, where he met his wife Elsie May Wall (nee Hayter).

Mrs Howell said one of the difficulties in tracing the grave had been the fact that it was unmarked and was outside the churchyard.

She said it was a mystery why Mr Wall had been buried in St Audries when his religion was Catholic, but it may have been because he lived at nearby Landshire Farm and taught in the estate house which was a girls’ school.

It was likely the grave was unmarked because her great-grandmother would not have been able to afford a gravestone when she had four young children to bring up.

Mrs Howell said: “This is just about giving him a memorial. I spoke to the War Graves Commission but they said a law was passed that if you died after 1919 you were not entitled to a War Grave.”

She was helped in her quest by West Quantoxhead historian, author, and church archivist Duncan Stafford.

Mrs Howell said the siting of her great-grandfather’s grave beside the church in St Audries was appropriate because it was on the Landshire Farm side of the building and was facing the Bristol Channel, Mr Wall having been born in Bristol.