A man originally from Nepal has visited the church graveyard in Milverton village this week on a quest to pay his respects to the army major who was his own father’s commanding officer in Malaya.

Hem Pun, a 60-year-old retired bus driver who lives in London, is planning to establish a small museum in Nepal to honour his father and other Gurkhas, and had appealed on Facebook to find out about what he believed was the reburial in St Michael’s churchyard of Major Thomas Anthony Wimbush, son of a couple who lived at Rivers Farm, Milverton, until 1962.

Hem’s father, Thandraj Pun, served under Major Wimbush as an orderly in the 4/2nd Gurkha Rifles (4th Battalion, 2nd King Edward VII's Own Gurkha Rifles). When the battalion was due to become part of the post-independence Indian Army, Major Wimbush made sure Hem’s father instead joined his own British Army regiment, the 1/2nd Gurkha Rifles, in 1948.

“He must have liked my father. It was only because of the Major that he went to the British Army, and it meant he had a better life, and I did,” said Hem. “I felt I needed to pay my respects and being here, seeing the memorial in Milverton, is connecting the families.”

Major Wimbush was killed in a courageous charge in 1951, during the Malayan Emergency, a war between communist, pro-independence guerillas and forces of the Federation of Malaya and British Empire.

Hem has been researching Major Wimbush as part of writing about his late father, who eventually retired from the army as a major and established the house in Nepal where the community museum will be.

He found that Major Wimbush was buried with full military honours at a military cemetery in Singapore, from which the graves were relocated to Kranji Military Cemetery nearby. Hem appealed on a Milverton Facebook site for further information, as he had read that Major Wimbush’s body was repatriated there, so he decided to come and pay his respects.

Milverton vicar Helene Stainer helped identify that although both Major Wimbush’s parents were buried in the church graveyard, and there was a memorial cross beside their graves for the Major’s brother who died at 14, there was no record of the Major himself being buried - although he is mentioned on the same memorial.

“It is very unusual to have someone remembered on a gravestone but not buried there. It would have been a special request, to bring the family together,” said Rev Stainer.

Further research by the Ministry of Defence confirmed that the Major was still buried at Kranji Military Cemetery, and now Hem plans to visit it in Singapore.

He was also able to visit Rivers Farm, where the owners gave him some mementoes that he will add to the museum, and he plans to write up stories he has gathered of men like his father, who left his work as a shepherd on the mountainside, to go as a malnourished 17-year-old and join the army.