RELATIVES of young soldiers who lost their lives in a wartime tragedy are being hunted to take part in a rededication ceremony.

On January 17, 1945, ten soldiers drowned while taking part in a military exercise at Guyzance, on the River Coquet, in Northumberland.

Fifty years after the tragedy, a memorial was erected at the site and now the Durham Light Infantry is trying to trace the men's relatives.

The river was in full flood and their boat was swept over the weir and capsized. The men, all aged 18, were weighed down by full combat gear and drowned.

Ronald Peddelty, from Newton Aycliffe, was 20 when his brother, Maurice, was killed.

He said: "I was working as a blacksmith at the colliery at the time and one of my other brothers, who was on leave from the Army, came to tell me the news.

"It was a terrible shock because Maurice had only joined up a few months before and was still on training.

"They were on a boat going across the river when a big roll came down and swept them away. He wasn't found until six or seven weeks afterwards."

Local historian, Vera Vaggs, was a 14-year-old schoolgirl at Alnwick at the time. She said: "Everyone was shocked because the lads who drowned were the same age as people we knew in the village who had gone off to war.

"There was lots of talk about it but it was kept very quiet because it was wartime and it was under a class D classification."

In 1995, a memorial service was held to markthe 50th anniversary of the tragedy and a plaque was erected, which now stands in the way of a re-development.

Bernard Seyburn, secretary of the DLI Association Darlington and Newton Aycliffe Branch, said: "The landowner, Sir Anthony Milburn, has kindly allowed us to move the plaque to a new site nearby and we are planning to hold a rededication ceremony.

"We managed to trace the relatives of two of the men when the plaque was put up but we are hoping to trace some of the others."