A special event has been held in Girvan to honour the memory of a man killed when a German U-boat torpedoed a troop ship during the Second World War.

Francesco D'Inverno was one of the 805 people who died when the SS Arandora Star was attacked west of County Donegal on July 2, 1940.

Francesco's body was found washed ashore near Lendalfoot, but it took more than 80 years for him to be identified.

South Ayrshire's Provost, Iain Campbell, gathered with other local dignitaries, representatives of the Italian community and founders of the Girvan and District Great War Project (GADGWP), Lorna and Ritchie Conaghan, on Wednesday, April 17 for the unveiling of a headstone that marks Francesco’s final resting place in Girvan’s Doune Cemetery.

Francesco's body was discovered by a nine-year-old boy on August 20, 1940, almost two months after the Arandora Star was sunk, and buried in a plain black coffin in a grave that, until this week, was unmarked.

Eighty-three years later, in September of last year, the Italian Garden Improvement Group (IGIG), a community group based in Glasgow, managed to confirm his identity, and within a few days, Ritchie and Lorna had managed to track down three surviving members of Francesco's family, all of them living in Kent.

Following additional research by the Girvan and District Great War Project (GADGWP), the precise location of the grave was pinpointed and and it was confirmed that grave contained the sole remains of Mr Francesco D'Inverno, born in Villa Latina, Lazio, Italy in 1901.

Francesco was living in London during the 1930s, worked at Selsdon House Hotel, and had married Ginevera Tasselli in April 1939.

Sadly, Francesco, like many other Italians living in Britain, was arrested as an "enemy alien" following Italy's entry into World War Two in June, 1940.

He was detained as an 'internee', and sent to the notorious Warth Mills Internment Camp in Bury, Lancashire.

From there, he was transferred to Liverpool where he was selected for deportation to an internment camp in Canada for the duration of the war.

Francesco was assigned to travel on the Arandora Star, which had been built on the Mersey as the SS Arandora as an ocean liner.

Renamed the Arandora Star, the ship was requisitioned for war service and brought evacuees from Norway to Glasgow and later from France and Spain to England.

She was then ordered to transport Italian and German internees from Liverpool to Canada, but just a few hours into the voyage, she was hit by a torpedo fired from the German submarine U-47, around 75 miles off the north-west coast of Ireland.

More than 800 men lost their lives, though more than 850 survived.

Francesco is the only known victim of the sinking to have been washed ashore on the Scottish mainland, and recent research by Dr Terri Colpi confirms he is one of only 22 Italian victims to have been formally identified.

The IGIG group had been looking to raise funds for a formal headstone for Francesco, and to trace down and contact his family.