The widow of a Royal Air Force engineer will visit Sri Lanka with her daughter to see where her husband served in the Second World War.

Hazel Murgatroyd, 83, of Birkenshaw, wrote to her future husband Harry as a pen-pal while he was stationed with her brother in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, from 1942 to 1945.

She did not meet him until he returned to England in 1946 and was posted at Amesbury, seven miles from where she was living in Salisbury.

The couple married and relocated to Birstall in 1947, to be near Birkenshaw where Mr Murgatroyd was raised.

Mrs Murgatroyd said she and her daughter, Cynthia McManus, 58, of Birkenshaw, were looking forward to visiting the sites where Mr Murgatroyd, who died 28 years ago aged 60, served as a Leading Aircraftsman for the RAF.

The pair will be travelling to Sri Lanka for 13 days next month after being awarded a grant of £3,700 through the Big Lottery Fund’s Heroes Return 2 programme.

She said: “My daughter is looking forward to it as she has never been and I don’t think any of us realised the dangers that they were in from the Japanese all those years ago.

“I don’t think I realised until more recent years just how easily they could have taken Ceylon.”

Mrs Murgatroyd visited the country with friends five years ago on an earlier Heroes Return programme.

She said: “It was very nostalgic because the first hotel we stayed at was a place called Mount Cavinia and when we got to the hotel we were looking out of the window and my husband’s friend said ‘that was where Harry used to swim’.”

The Big Lottery Fund has announced awards of almost £17,625 to 25 Second World War veterans, widows, spouses and carers from the Yorkshire and the Humber region to go on commemorative trips.

Vanessa White, Big Lottery Fund head of region for Yorkshire and the Humber, said: “A huge debt of gratitude and recognition is owed by today’s society to the men and women who fought across the world and I am delighted we are able to offer lottery funding for them to return and pay their respects at the places they served.’’