Leader
Forever Anzac
Today is Anzac Day, when Australia and New Zealand pay homage to the sacrifices of past generations and, as Chris Lloyd discovers, a family on Teesside remember their own war hero.
TODAY, on the other side of the world, is a day of quiet reflection and remembrance. It is a day Down Under to remember the sacrifices of past generations. It is a day in Australia and New Zealand which is solemn and spiritual, a day which begins, fortified by a "gunfire breakfast", with a Dawn Service.
So it is on this side, because in Teesside's Acklam Cemetery there is a corner of an English field that is forever Anzac.
Our story begins in the late 1860s when Henry Taylor emigrated from Catterick, North Yorkshire, for a new life in New Zealand. He worked at first for the Maoris who, out of gratitude, gave him 365 acres of land - one for every day of the year - near Whangarie on the north island.
There in 1891, Henry's eldest son Harry was born. Harry was destined to follow in his father's farming footsteps. "But he was on a training mission with the Territorial Army when war broke out in 1914 and he never went home," says Morris Taylor in his front room in Thornaby, surrounded by sepia pictures of broad-chested Kiwis who went to war in broad-rimmed bushwacker hats.
A kiwi tie-pin, made from an iridescent turquoise seashell called paua which is found on NZ beaches, twinkles on the 88-year-old's chest as he tells of his father.
As part of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force, Harry sailed for pre-combat training in Egypt. The Allies wanted to open an Eastern Front, partly to distract the Germans from the Western Front and partly to open a sea route through the Dardenelles Straits into the Black Sea so that Russia could join the conflict more fully.
The narrow Dardenelles are guarded by the Gallipoli peninsula. In February 1915, Winston Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty, thought the British Navy could bombard its way through the straits, but the shellfire from the Turks on the peninsula was too strong. A land invasion was necessary to clear the Turks from Gallipoli.
Harry and the New Zealanders joined forces with the Australians to form the Anzacs (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) and set sail from Egypt to be involved in their countries' first major conflict.
They landed on Gallipoli at dawn on April 25, 93 years ago - no doubt the poor souls could have done with the "gunfire breakfast", coffee laced with rum, with which their countrymen now begin Anzac Day.
It was a disaster. They had drifted two kilometres too far north and were faced with towering cliffs and impenetrable ravines. The Turks were far better armed than expected and occupied the high ground.
"They couldn't get out of the water to start with and then they had the cliffs to contend with so they didn't make much headway inland," says Morris.
Very soon, the Eastern Front became as bogged down in trench warfare as the Western Front. The New Zealanders' most notable success came in August when they captured Chunuk Bair hill only to be swept from it the following day. Of the 760 who made it to the summit, 711 came down as casualties.
The horribly hot and humid summer turned into the blizzards of winter. In thaw, trenches flooded, soldiers drowned, dead bodies were washed away.
The New Zealanders invented self-firing rifles - water dripped into containers attached to the triggers - to cover their backs and they successfully withdrew by January 9, 1916.
The Gallipoli campaign had cost 120,000 lives. More than 2,700 of the dead were New Zealanders - a quarter of those who had landed - with a further 4,500 wounded.
Harry was one of the wounded. Somewhere amid the carnage, he'd been mown down by a machine gun.
"He had three or four bullet holes through his legs and out the other side," says Morris.
His sister, Gwynneth, 75, chips in. "They went in behind the tibia and out through his calf," she says, her medical knowledge betraying her career as a ward sister at South Cleveland and Poole hospitals.
Harry was sent to a hospital on the Epsom Downs, Surrey, to recover. His stay was long enough for him to form an attachment with a nurse, Elizabeth Morris from Ebbw Vale. Twice he was sent back to the front, twice he was gassed and bombarded around Ypres, twice he came back to Elizabeth for repairs.
In April 1919, they married. They settled in her hometown where Morris was born in 1920. "Father started work in the steelworks, but it was completely foreign to him," says Morris. "He was brought up as a farmer and yet was serving his time as a wheelwright."
Just before the deadline expired on the NZ government's scheme to pay the passage for returning soldiers, Harry sailed his growing family - including a six-week-old baby - to the other side of the world. Morris rode to school across a creek on the back of cow, and thoroughly enjoyed himself. "I had a very strong Welsh accent and I took some stick," he says. "They called me Lloyd George."
His mother, though, was horribly homesick. After five years, they sailed back around the world but found only temporary work in Ebbw Vale.
"My mother had a cousin in Middles-broh," says Morris, pronouncing the placename in his Welsh/Kiwi accent as a long-established Teessider would, "and Middlesbroh was starting to boom. He came up, got a job at Dorman Long steelworks, got a few bob together and then sent for us."
When Harry died in 1969, the New Zealand government paid for his headstone in Acklam in recognition that his health had suffered because of the war. "The shellshock knocked seven bells out of him," says Morris.
"Sometimes his speech went," says Gwynneth. "He knew what he wanted to say but he struggled. We used to speak for him a lot of the time. He didn't talk very much about Gallipoli. It was as if that chapter had closed."
Morris dredges his memory. "But his favourite song was about Charlie Chaplin," he says. "I remember him singing the chorus: 'And his old baggy trousers want mending, before they send him, to the Dardenelles'."
Morris continues: "My father never missed Anzac Day. It was a day of silence and remembrance." Particularly as his nephew William, another Anzac, was killed during the Second World War when his bomber crashed in Cambridgeshire.
"Father never talked very much of his experiences, but we knew what the day was."
10:38am Friday 25th April 2008
Print 
Email this
What are these links for?
If you liked this article and would like to share it with others on the web who might be searching for good content we've made it easy for you to do it.
At the bottom of all articles, you'll see links to six sites. These sites - commonly called 'social bookmark' or 'social news' sites - have large communities of web users who share and rate interesting, useful and fun things on the web.
Clicking the links will automatically add the address of the story you are reading to one of these sites, letting you share it with others. Each site will ask you to register to share stories. Registration is free and once a member, you can store, recommend and search for stories that interest you.
More on Digg
More on del.icio.us
More on Furl
More on reddit
More on NowPublic/
More on Yahoo!
