Gallipoli was one of the most catastrophic Allied campaigns of the first world war. It was intended to force the Ottoman Empire out of the war, relieving pressure on Russia, but the landings failed, costing the lives of over 140,000 Allied and Turkish troops.

Today, the tragedy of Gallipoli is famous for its role in forging Australia and New Zealand’s national identities, thanks to the sacrifices of the men of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) on the beaches and gullies of the Turkish peninsula. But thousands of British, Irish, French and Indian troops also took part in the campaign, including my grandfather Frank Skinner. I never knew Frank, as he died in 1942, but the recent Rest is History podcast series about the first world war in 1915 gave me a poignant insight into his likely experience at Gallipoli, and the influence it had on our family.

Like so many veterans of the war, Frank never spoke about what he went through, and as a result I didn’t even know until relatively recently that he was a Gallipoli veteran. My father Bob spoke eloquently about growing up with parents shellshocked by the trauma of the Great War, yet living under the growing threat of another terrible conflict. Bob explained how his gentle father Frank’s terrible memories led him to ban Bob from joining his school’s officer cadet unit on the eve of the second world war.

Now I have a better understanding of what Frank went through on those awful months in 1915. In his The Rest is History series on 1915, Dominic Sandbrook gave a graphic account of the soldiers’ ordeal, including the impact of dysentery, which was rife. (He describes it as a central element of the Gallipoli experience.) Lacking toilets or toilet paper, the men used precious letters from home to clean themselves. When these ran out, they resorted to their bare hands, wiping these on their clothes or the dirt under their feet.

Sandbrook recalls how how the toughest of troops would cry with the misery and humiliation of dysentery. (‘We wept not because we were frightened but because we were so dirty’.) He quotes British ordinary seaman Joe Murray’s account of the appalling death of one of his friends. His pal had ‘once been as smart and upright as a guardsman’ yet after 10 days of illness he was crawling about, trousers round his feet, his shirt all soiled. Murray and another comrade dragged him to the latrine, and tried to turn him so his backside was facing the trench. ‘But he simply rolled into this foot-wide trench, head first into the slime.’ Murray and his comrade didn’t have strength to get him out quickly, and the hapless victim couldn’t help himself at all. They did eventually get him out, ‘but he was dead, drowned in his own excrement’.

Sandbrook says that this horrendous story has stuck in his mind since he first read it, and I can understand why. When we think of Gallipoli, we think of Allied soldiers dying under the onslaught of the Turkish artillery and machine gun fire, yet Murray’s vivid account reveals that the ordeal of those poor men ran much deeper. Over 145,000 British troops alone fell sick, and almost 3 in every 100 men removed as non-battle casualties died – three times the proportion in France and Flanders. 

No wonder my grandfather couldn’t speak about this supreme personal ordeal, other than to ban his son Bob from enlisting in the Emmanuel School officer cadet unit in 1938. I can just imagine his horror at the thought that Bob experience the same terrors. I can’t help wondering whether Frank’s wartime experience contributed to the ill health which led to his early death, aged 52, in 1942, two years before Bob was called up into the army on turning 18. Bob wrote movingly in 2020 about the father he lost too early, and his pride in this kind man.

Final thoughts

• On the centenary of the Gallipoli landings in 2015, I was fascinated by this ‘then and now’ photo feature on The Guardian’s website. I was haunted by the contrast between the peaceful sites today, compared with the terror of 1915.
• Joe Murray, whose harrowing story about Gallipoli I mention above, died aged 97 in 1994, less than a month before the death of my grandfather Frank’s widow Gwen – my Nan.
• We should remember the 86,000 Ottoman troops who died defending their homeland during the campaign. While Gallipoli boosted Australian and New Zealand national identity, it also forged the foundations of a modern Turkish republic under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who had made his reputation repelling the Allied invasion of Gallipoli.
• If Gallipoli made Kemal Atatürk’s reputation, it shattered that of Winston Churchill. Churchill, the first lord of the Admiralty, was a prime mover behind the campaign, and he was forced from office. Even as Britain faced another world war in 1939, Churchill’s reputation as an gambler and adventurer was held against him. His masterly war leadership from May 1940 finally allowed the memories of Gallipoli to fade into the background, even if they never entirely disappeared.