THE son of a First World War soldier has sold his Bournemouth home so he can publish his late father’s harrowing memoirs that have recently been unearthed.

John Burder has turned the hundreds of pages of text written by Captain Claud Burder into a book after finding masses of documents hidden in a dusty trunk in the attic.

The 72-year-old managed to run off a limited edition of 500 hardback copies of his father’s horrifying account of life in the trenches, called ‘Hell on Earth’, which were mostly given to friends and family.

But he believes the memoirs ought to be read by a wider audience and, after he started getting requests from more people, he approached several publishing companies with no success. So Mr Burder has sold his detached home in Bournemouth and moved into a Branksome bungalow to raise £25,000 to fund the publishing project, including having the book professionally designed.

Using the self-publishing house New Generation, he will be printing on-demand, but is hoping to produce 10,000 copies and wants to supply as many as possible to schools and colleges.

‘Hell on Earth’ details the grim and bloody experiences Capt Burder endured in the trenches, including seeing a comrade ‘blown to pieces’ while stood next to him and diving for cover from a shell only to land on a dead comrade.

Despite completing hundreds of pages, Capt Burder locked the manuscript in a chest and never spoke about the war before his death in 1968 aged 87. His son inherited his family’s belongings but didn’t get round to opening the trunk until 2009.

He was stunned when he learned of what his father had gone through at the notorious battlegrounds of Ypres and the Somme.

Mr Burder, a retired TV producer, said: “The book is not the work of a journalist or a historian or a general getting reports from people at the front. It is a verbatim, contemporary account written by a man who was there throughout the entire war.

“A man who suffered with his men and went through it all and somehow survived it.

“It should be read by any young person who has even the slightest interest in the war, because it does show how stupid and futile it was. I thought it my duty to try and get my father’s story in front of as many people as possible.”

Capt Burder’s war ended in 1918 when he was struck in the head by a piece of shell. A young officer who had been stood next to him was ‘blown to pieces’ in the explosion. He wrote: “Nothing whatsoever was left of him, not a single button.”