The other Horatio Nelson

Burnham Thorpe produced two seafaring Horatio Nelsons, a former rector of the North Norfolk village has discovered.

Norfolk's famous son and national hero who looks down on Trafalgar Square breathed his last during the famous sea battle.

His namesake, according to the Rev Cecil Isaacson, lies in a humble grave in a small parish churchyard in the north of Ireland. The retired rector became fascinated by the career of this mysterious "other Nelson" ever since a man from Fahan, Londonderry, wrote to tell him of a gravestone in his village marked "Horatio Nelson... late midshipman of HMS Endymion... born at Burnham Thorpe."

After long research Mr Isaacson published a book about the other Nelson.

His real name was Thomas and he would have been 12 when Lord Nelson died at Trafalgar.

Probably influenced by the career of the village hero he took to sea and served as a midshipman in the Endymion captained by Sir William Bolton. In 1811 he became ill when the ship was off the coast of Ireland and Admiral Bolton took the boy, now 18 and known as Horatio, into his own home at Fahan.

He died there holding the admiral's hand several weeks later and it was Sir William who put up the tombstone.

The Other Horatio Nelson of Burnham Thorpe by Rev Cecil Isaacson was published in 1991.