HE only reminder - apart from painful memories - that Bridport's Ron Murphy had of his D-Day landing craft were the keys.

That was until model maker Daniel Taylor presented him with an exact replica last week.

It was the 92-year-old ex-naval man's son Barry back for a visit from Australia who started the ball rolling when he asked his dad if he had any pictures or reminders of his D-Day experiences on Juno beach.

The answer was no, so they set about finding a model maker and Daniel Taylor fit the bill. Himself an former military man he now works for the Imperial War Museums, Bovington Tank Museum, for films and TV and he readily agreed to the project.

Last week he drove from his home in Kent to hand over the model.

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Mr Taylor said: "I have been working for years in film and TV. One of my areas of particular interests has been landing craft and that is how Mr Murphy discovered me.

"He was part of a flotilla landed by the infantry ship the Duke of Argyll.

"He made two runs into the beach, during the second his craft struck a ' dinner plate' mine placed on a stake in the water. It was very rudimentary but simple and effective way to blow you up - and it was difficult to spot six million mines across the coast of northern France."

Mr Murphy considers himself to be very fortunate to be alive and thrilled to get his model and finally somewhere to display the salt-rusted keys to his landing craft - the only part of it that survived.

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He said: "I was very fortunate. I came down on the second run in and there was still quite a swell. I recall going up on the swell and as I came down it was on the tip of the post which had been covered by the tide. The first thing I thought was 'wasn't I lucky there wasn't a mine that's normally attached to the top'."

He soon discovered that wasn't the case and to this day he doesn't know why he had the crew and three communications specialists on the side of the craft.

He said: "I STill don't know why I did it but I got them sitting outside on the side which people would say was a rather silly thing to do bearing mind what was coming out from the coast but it saved our lives because when the mine went off it blew us out of the water."

Mr Murphy lost consciousness in the water but came to and managed to get the one casualty - the stoker with a shattered arm - to shore.

He spent the rest of the day on stretcher duty on the beach.

At the end of a gruelling day he got a lift back on a tank landing craft and spent two weeks on 'survivor's leave' in Gosport where he was given new clothes.

"We looked like rookies," he said.

He was far from a rookie having started serving his country first as an ARP bicycle messenger. When he was 16 he joined the Home Guard - and he insists it was nothing like Dad's Army.

He volunteered for the navy at 17 and served on combined ops under Mountbatten.

After the war he joined the Admiralty and eventually worked on Portland for the Admiralty Underwater Weapons Establishment before he retired.

He was awarded the MBE in 1980.