Can you help D-Day veteran find the family of the man who saved his life?

As King Charles and Queen Camilla sat in the beautiful new British D-Day memorial on the cliffs above Gold Beach, they listened to a veteran speak about the man who saved his life on that day 80 years ago.

After the largest seaborne invasion ever mounted, Arthur Oborne, was fighting to free Normandy in the bloody battles which followed D-Day. He was shot by a German sniper. The bullet went into his chest and through his lung, but remarkably – he still had some life left in him. Arthur told the King and Queen, President Macron and all those gathered in the sunshine on Thursday, that the man who saved his life was Lance Corporal Walter Gummerson – or Gummy – who was serving with the 6th Battalion, The Duke of Wellington’s Regiment.

Gummy strapped up Arthur and dragged him out of harm’s way and into a field hospital where army medics were able to save his life.

But Gummy was not so lucky. He went back out into the battlefields of Normandy.

The very next day he was killed by Nazi troops along with the rest of his unit.

This week, Arthur Oborne, now 100, stood proudly in front of the newly-cut stone slabs into which the names of the fallen have been inscribed. “I wish I could tell him that I have never taken his sacrifice for granted and will always remember him and our friends,” Mr Oborne said.

“So Gummy, thank you my old friend.”

His short speech was enough to move many in the audience to tears.

Arthur, who lives in Portishead near Bristol, is one of around just three dozen D-Day veterans who made it back to the beaches they had landed on in 1944 – the youngest of them are now are in their 90s.

His daughter said after the ceremony that Arthur’s dying wish is to meet a member of Gummy’s family to thank them in person.

All they know is that Walter Gummerson was from Wales.

Gummy’s family may or may not still live there. Perhaps they still don’t know what their father, grandfather or great-grandfather did on the day before his death in 1944.

After he spoke at the memorial, Mr Oborne told his story to Queen Camilla at reception nearby.

Both the Queen and King spent 90 minutes in the marquee, listening to the stories of the D-Day veterans and holding their hands in appreciation.

As the King said his own speech at the same event: “Our gratitude is unfailing and our admiration eternal.”

And he remarked on how this is one of the last major D-Day anniversaries which will be able to host those who fought in the campaign to free Normandy and, later, all of France.

“Our ability to learn from their stories at first hand diminishes. But our obligation to remember them, what they stood for and what they achieved for us all can never diminish,” Charles said.

It is nonetheless quite remarkable that, at the age of 100, Arthur Oborne still hasn’t been able to find the family of Gummy who gave him a further 80 years of life, but lost his own in northern France in those difficult and dark days of 1944.

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