By Ruth Banks

Several decades after a tragic car crash killed a much-loved sailor, a group of his colleagues will finally pay their respects at his graveside tomorrow.

Able Seaman Kevin Whale was a hugely-popular member of the crew that worked on the re-fit of HM Submarine Valiant at Chatham Dockyard in 1989.

But when he was killed in a road accident a year later, when the submarine had sailed on to Faslane in Scotland, operational commitments prevented his crewmates from attending his funeral.

They never even found out where he was buried until a chance event 29 years later led one of them to stumble across his grave in Gillingham.

Now the former crew-mates are coming together from all over the world to attend a memorial service for Kevin at Woodlands cemetery on Saturday.

Organiser Paul Williamson, 47, said it had been an emotional discovery.

"We didn't know where Kevin was buried and he wasn’t from Kent," he said.

"But last year, one of the guys decided to go up to Chatham to visit a friend’s grave in Gillingham.

"He was standing looking at it, when his wife noticed that two graves along was a grave which had HMS Valiant inscribed on it.

"He was shocked to tears because we didn't know where Kevin was buried at all, and to find his grave in such circumstances was kind of an omen."

Amazingly, Paul has tracked down the minister who originally conducted the service, and has even traced Kevin’s daughter Cherie, who was only three months old when her father died.

He said: "I had the number for about five days but I didn't know what to say. Eventually she answered the phone and I said the words ‘You don't know me but I knew your father’ and she burst into tears.

"She said it was the best thing that ever happened because she'd never known her father.

"She's coming along to the memorial service and it's the first time she'll ever have been at her father's grave.

"I think that it's closure for us. It'll be quite an emotional day."