A Southend family has finally received the Christmas gift it has longed and prayed for across more than 60 years - news that their brother Bob is alive and well.

Bob Lee, last heard of when he was pictured as a smiling Aussie soldier during the war, has been traced to a home in Western Australia.

And, at 74, he has in his room a new group photo to prove he has a family he could never remember, one he never truly believed really might exist.

A helper at the home, Prague House, told This Is Essex: "It is a fairy story of the 90s. Robert Leonard Lee came to live here in early 1993, a man unknown to us, who had lived in rough conditions for some time.

"Now he belongs to a loving group who will never lose him again."

The stranger-than-fiction tale was first revealed by This Is Essex feeder paper The Echo in September 1995.

It triggered worldwide TV interest and sparked a search backed by Australian Prime Minister Robert Keating.

Six of seven surviving members of the original Lee family of nine had gathered at the Shaftesbury Avenue, Thorpe Bay, home of Lydia Heiser, now in her mid-80s, for a joyful, yet tearful, reunion after years of uncertainty and parting.

They had been separated as children, having been abandoned by their father. Two girls stayed with the mother, and the boys were sent to homes.

And two of them, Fred and Robert Leonard, whom they all knew as Len, were packed off to Australia as part of that infamous exodus of orphaned or abandoned children shipped to the other side of the world in the 1930s.

Many of this lost generation suffered abuse, cruelty, and deprivation.

Fred Lee was sent to a vast, remote farm as a boy labourer when he and Len were split up after arriving in Western Australia.

He escaped and went on to build a happy family life for himself.

But he never, ever forgot the horrors of his boyhood - "Ordered everywhere, marching around, hands freezing in winter, bare feet scorched on the hot, baked earth in summer."

He never forgot his family, either - especially Len, two years older, who survived with him the long, terrifying voyage on the Barradene.

Now, this lifetime later, both still in Australia, the two elderly men have been reunited.

And they have shared cards and phone messages with others of the family in Southend and London, though sadly two brothers have died since that mass get-together in Southend back in 1995.

Brother Jim, 78, spent many years in institutions and then five years as a prisoner of war.

In a recent letter to Len, he enclosed a copy of his now-traced younger brother's birth certificate, with the message: "I'm sure it will be of some help and comfort to you as proof that you do belong to someone.

"We all had that dreadful feeling of being abandoned, but we have all been united now, some of us sooner than later."

At Prague House, a spokesman said: "Robert Leonard Lee arrived as a boy at Fairbridge Farm in Western Australia on Christmas Day 1935.

"He went to an orphanage, which he left at 15, and he became a parachutist in wartime, learning to speak fluent Japanese as part of the occupational force.

"There is a 50-year void in his life. When he came to us, we concentrated on the present, on his daily living.

"Now he has a past and a loving family.

"It is a wonderful, wonderful ending to his story."

Happy day - as Fred, Lydia, Dennis and Jim gathered for a special reunion in 1995 and, right, Len Lee, known as Bob, standing proudly in his Australian army uniform

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