THE heart-warming story of how the memory of a Weymouth man was kept alive will be revisited on television tonight.
The Frisian island of Texel in northern Holland is the focus of a series of short films being shown on BBC1’s magazine programme The One Show this week.
Researchers uncovered a story from 2008 of how islander Maarten Brugge was moved after finding a ‘message in a bottle’. The bottle, containing photographs, a Dorset Echo clipping, a letter and some of the ashes of the late John Lea of Weymouth, had been thrown from a ship in the English Channel by Mr Lea’s son Kevin.
Kevin said he wanted to send his dad on ‘one last big adventure’ and asked anyone finding the bottle to write to him.
Mr Brugge, who was the second person to find the bottle, was so moved by the find he contacted his local newspaper about it and it went on to make national headlines in the Netherlands.
He later returned the bottle to the North Sea.
The story will be featured in a section on The One Show which is on BBC1 at 7pm.
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