AN East Lancashire-born soldier, killed in action in the First World War, has just been identified as one of the lost soldiers of Fromelles.

It was back in 2009, when the remains and artefacts of 250 Australian and British soldiers were discovered in an unmarked mass grave at Pheasant Wood in northern France and only this week it was revealed that, after painstaking DNA tests, one of them is Henry Gardner, who was born at Dunsop Bridge, Whitewell.

Reburied at Fromelles (Pheasant Wood) Military Cemetery - built in 2009 and the first in 50 years - after the sad discovery, the Commonweath Graves Commission will erect his new headstone during the annual commemoration ceremony in July.

Henry, one of three siblings, was born in 1886, before the family moved to Blackburn; documents show he attended St Peter's RC School in Mill Hill.

Indeed, the 1911 census gives the family's address as 64, Belgrave Street and that his father was a club steward and his mother a housekeeper.

Believed to be an unemployed weaver and unmarried, Henry went to Australia when he was 25 and became an asylum attendant at Parramatta near Sydney - his name is included on the hospital's WWI roll of honour.

He enlisted in the Australian Army in July,1915 and was posted to the 30th Infantry Battalion; he served in Egypt before being sent to the Western Front.

He was killed in no man's land, at Fleurbaix on July 20, 1916, his next of kin being recorded as his sister, Mrs Elizabeth Ashton, who lived in Walton-le-Dale.

The Battle of Fromelles was intended as a diversion to stop the Germans making for the Somme, but became a slaughter; records kept by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission show that 1,780 Australian soldiers and 503 British soldiers died, but many of these bodies were not recovered.

The remains of 250 of them had lain undiscovered in their mass grave for 93 years before they were excavated from a muddy field, nine years ago.

Boots, purses, toothbrushes and other personal artefacts lay among the skeletons, offering partial clues about the men's identities; since then DNA specialists have worked tirelessly in a bid to put a name to each unknown soldier.