David Walliams discovered a huge secret about his great-grandad during an appearance on Who Do You Think You Are? and it appeared to shock his family

David Walliams discovers life-changing family secret about great-grandad

David Walliams has discovered his paternal great-grandfather was a First World War hero driven insane by the horrors of battle.

The Britain’s Got Talent star also found out in BBC1’s Who Do You Think You Are? that he is descended from a blind traveller who begged for a living as an organ-grinder.

John George Boorman, a married labourer with three kids, enlisted in the Grenadier Guards in 1914 aged 32.

By 1915 he was in the trenches, facing a landscape ravaged by shells and strewn with corpses. Looking at a picture, Walliams says: “If you want to imagine hell, it’s like this.”

Shell-shocked after a few months, he returned to Britain but was sent back to the slaughter of the Somme in 1916.