TUESDAY, May 19, 2015, marks the 100th anniversary of the death of “the bloke with the donk”. He is one of the North-East’s most famous war heroes – although he is more famous Down Under than he is up here.

Perhaps a new book by a County Durham family historian will change that.

The bloke with the donk was John Simpson Kirkpatrick, who was born in South Shields in 1892. Each summer, he worked at Murphy’s Fair, giving donkey rides to children. He developed an affinity with the animals that were doing the donkey work.

In 1909, he joined the Merchant Navy and sailed from Newcastle aboard SS Heighington. He ended up in another Newcastle, this one in New South Wales, where he deserted and earned a living on dry land as a cane-cutter or coal-miner.

To avoid being identified as a deserter, he dropped his surname Kirkpatrick, and became known as “John Simpson” – Simpson being the maiden name of his Scottish mother, Sarah.

At the outbreak of war, he joined the 3rd Australian Field Ambulance as a stretcher-bearer – a role usually given to the fittest men – and sailed for Europe with the Anzacs – the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps.

Just like Pte Harry Taylor, of Thornaby on Teesside, whose story was told in Memories 227, Pte John Simpson’s first taste of battle was when he landed at dawn on April 25, 1915, on the Gallipoli peninsula in Turkey.

The peninsula guards the Straits of the Dardenelles which lead from the Mediterranean into the Black Sea. The Anzac mission was to drive the Turks out of Gallipoli so that the Russians – the British allies – could get their navy out of the Black Sea and through the Dardanelles so that they could harass the Germans.

However, the Turks fiercely defended their peninsula, causing appalling casualties among the Anzacs. Consequently, Pte Simpson was kept very busy, carrying wounded men back from the battlefield to the ships in Anzac Cove that would take them from treatment.

On the second day, he spotted a stray donkey and, drawing on his affinity with the animal, pressed it into service. He would crawl out into no man’s land, drag back a wounded soldier and prop him up on the donkey as it carried him to safety.

Colonel John Monash wrote: "Pte Simpson and his little beast earned the admiration of everyone. They worked all day and night... Simpson knew no fear and moved unconcernedly amid shrapnel and rifle fire, steadily carrying out his self-imposed task day by day, and he frequently earned the applause of the personnel for his many fearless rescues of wounded men.”

Brigadier Charles Brand used more Australian terms to describe the heroism: “Almost every Digger knew about him. The question was often asked: 'Has the bloke with the donk stopped one yet?' It seemed incredible that anyone could make that trip up and down Monash Valley without being hit. Simpson escaped death so many times that he became completely fatalistic."

Eventually, a bullet did stop the bloke with the donk – at least four donkeys had died during the rescue operations when, on May 19, he was hit by machine gun fire in the stomach and killed instantly. His donkey survived, but panicked. With an injured man on its back, it bolted down its usual route to the beach where the soldier was rescued.

Some versions of the Simpson story say that this was at least the 300th man that he had rescued in three-and-a-half weeks – a statistic that is probably a human impossibility.

But undoubtedly, he was incredibly brave and he and his donkeys saved scores of lives. His story became an integral part of the Aussie account of the Gallipoli campaign, and there are statues dedicated to him on both sides of the world.

Eight years ago, Kelso Yuill from Witton le Wear received a phone call from a family historian in Australia who had spotted that, just like Pte Simpson, Kelso had a Sarah Simpson living in Scotland in the 1880s in his family tree. Could they be related?

After much research, the answer was no. But Kelso was hooked.

“I was intrigued that no biographies mentioned anything of his relatives, no grandparents, no aunts or uncles, or no cousins, so I set out to uncover the mystery surrounding his family,” he said.

So he researched the full story of the bloke with the donk. It includes adventures on the high seas, the despair of mental breakdown, the difficulties of illegitimacy, and the long lasting love between a mother and her son. It travels from Govan in Glasgow to Malaga in Spain and onto the goldfields of Australia, but of course it is rooted in South Shields where Pte Simpson’s mother and sister remained after his death.

In a bid to get this remarkable story better known, and to the delight of Pte Simpson’s family in Australia, Kelso has self-published the story in a book entitled Digger or Geordie. It costs £15, plus postage. Email kanda98@sky.com or call 01388-488376 for further details.