OLD soldier Gordon Rendle who lives in Marlborough is celebrating success in a campaign to get a memorial erected to wartime buddies who died when a gun blew up in their faces.

Mr Rendle, 76, has lived Marlborough in Kingsbury Street for 30 years but still makes pilgrimages back to the spot in Torquay where seven of his Home Guard buddies died.

Last year he lent his support to a campaign to get a memorial erected at Corbyn Head.

Colleagues in the South Devon Riviera town had campaigned for years without success.

With Mr Rendle's support renewed vigour was applied to the campaign, helped by the Torbay local newspaper and a group called the Turning Point Heritage Trust.

Now the Torbay council has agreed that a memorial can be erected.

Co-operative Funeral Homes has agreed to donate the pyramid shaped granite stone which will carry the names of the men who died and the verse adopted by the Royal British Legion from the Lawrence Binyon poem: "They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old ."

On August 11 Mr Rendle and his wife Margaret will be guests at the unveiling of the stone.

Like many other boys of his age in the Second World War, Mr Rendle, who was 16, pretended he was two years older to get into the local Home Guard unit.

They were taking part in an exercise at a gun site at Corbyn Head firing a four and a half inch gun out to sea. Mr Rendle was in the ammunition store just feet away when the breech of the gun exploded, killing five and leaving two more with mortal injuries.

He helped carry his dying and badly hurt mates some of them only 16 and 17, to a first aid post. A week later he was a bearer at their funerals.

Mr Rendle, who later served a as regular soldier with the Royal Artillery, said: "It has taken a long time to get this memorial and those of us who have been campaigning are all delighted at the outcome.

"It will be good to go to Corbyn Head and see a memorial to those good friends."