HE WAS one of the youngest people from Southampton to die in the Great War.

Edward Thomas Doncom was just 16 when he was presumed dead after the sinking of a hospital ship.

He is one of the city’s forgotten heroes who is not currently remembered on Southampton’s war memorials – but that could be about to change.

The Daily Echo has teamed up with Southampton City Council to launch our Find the Forgotten campaign to find and recognise the servicemen who gave their lives for their country but whose names are not recorded on the memorial wall.

The wall currently contains the name of 3,298 people who died during the First and Second World Wars, and other conflicts in the 20th and 21st centuries.

However there are potentially dozens of people from the city who are not recorded on the wall - and we have launched a search to find them.

The names of those nominated in the campaign will then be added to the wall in 2018 as the city marks the 100th anniversary of the end of the First World War.

The council is also hoping to raise £10,000 in a separate campaign to pay for the names of up to 100 servicemen to be added.

Edward Doncom could be one of those added in 2018, having already been identified as someone whose name should be on the memorial wall.

Records of his life are patchy, but he lived in College Street in Southampton before starting service aboard the hospital ship HMHS Asturias.

A liner between Southampton and Argentina in peacetime, the vessel was commandeered as a hospital ship and was used to treat injured servicemen in campaigns in Gallipoli, Salonika and Egypt.

It was also the ship on which the Lord of the Rings author JRR Tolkien, then an officer in the Lancashire Fusiliers, was taken back to England on when he was struck down with trench fever.

The Asturias had had a narrow escape already in 1915 when a German U-Boat fired a torpedo at her which failed to detonate.

Then on March 21, 1917, while en route from Avonmouth to Southampton, she was torpedoed by the UC-66 submarine.

Luckily there were no wounded on board when she was hit, but 31 people were killed and a further 12 – including Doncom – were missing, later presumed to be dead.

The Asturias was still in a good enough shape to be used as a floating ammunition hulk off Plymouth for the next two years, before she was eventually scrapped in 1933.