Guy Stringer is travelling to Belgium to repay an act of kindness shown to his heartbroken dad more than 80 years ago.

Mr Stringer, 77, was deeply moved to learn how a farming family consoled his father when his brother, Mr Stringer's uncle, was killed in the First World War.

Mr Stringer, of Uplands Park Road, north Oxford, discovered from his father's diary that the Vermeersch family had offered roses to be placed on Lt Guy Stringer's grave in 1915.

This weekend Mr Stringer, a former director of Oxfam, will meet the descendants of the kind farmer and his wife - still on the same farm - and present them with four rose bushes.

He said: "My father kept a diary, now in the Imperial War Museum. About his brother's death he wrote: 'The patron at the farm where the battery is, gave me a bunch of very nice roses and seemed to be very sorry about Guy'."

Two of the rose plants he will hand to the Vermeersch family will be Roses of Remembrance, specially grown by the Commonwealth War Grave Commission.

Mr Stringer added: "I feel this gives our two families a very special link."

He will be travelling to Belgium with his son Dick, 44, and daughter Sarah Griffiths for the emotional meeting with the grandchildren of the compassionate French farmer.

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