A FORMER RAF serviceman should finally be reunited with his war medals tomorrow (Monday October 12) following more than a week of anguish since they went missing.

Donald Nicholson, a flight engineer who helped the crews of RAF Bomber Command to get off the ground during the Second World War, feared the medals he won for his war-time service may have been lost forever.

The 92-year-old veteran from Houghton-le-Spring, on Wearside, was plunged into misery when he could not find the five service medals on arrival at the site of the new Bomber Command Memorial, in Lincoln, earlier this month.

He was picked up by taxi and taken, free-of-charge, to Lincoln having been invited for the opening ceremony of the memorial, as one of the few survivors of war-time days on the many air bases dotted down the east of England.

Mr Nicholson believed he had dropped the medals on arriving for the unveiling, in Lincoln, on Friday October 2.

It meant he was unable to wear them during the ceremony and returned home to the North-East in the belief they were lying somewhere on, or near to the memorial site.

News of his loss spread and a full-scale search was carried out on the site featuring metal detector enthusiasts and other volunteers late last week, all to no avail.

But the true whereabouts of the medals lay nearer to home, on Houghton’s Dairy Lane estate.

While the searchers were sifting the memorial grounds, a dog walker, new to the estate, found them in the roadside near to Mr Nicholson’s home.

Unaware, at the time, who they belonged to, he handed them in at the nearby police station.

Subsequent publicity about Mr Nicholson’s plight led to the finder contacting the police, who, in turn, notified Mr Nicholson of their recovery.

“When I was told they were found and handed in to the police intact, it was like I had won the lottery,” said the highly relieved veteran.

“Apparently they were found on the morning I left to go to Lincoln, in the gutter, just a few yards from my house.

“I must have dropped them when I was getting into the taxi on the passenger side.”

Mr Nicholson’s hopes of collecting them on Saturday (October 10) were dashed, however, by modern-day police bureaucracy, as the lost and found property office at Houghton-le-Spring Police Station remains closed on weekends.

But PC Gary Morris, who was on duty at the station, pledged that arrangements would be put in place to ensure they are finally handed back to Mr Nicholson, once the office reopens on Monday morning (October 12).