Portsmouth Battalion, Royal Naval Division

‘He was a complete wreck…’

Studio portrait of Lance Corporal Walter Parker VC, Portsmouth Battalion, Royal Marine Light Infantry. Parker’s medal is just visible in this photograph on his tunic but it is not clear of this is a superimposed image. [Photograph in Stephen Snelling, VCs of the First World War: Gallipoli, Stroud, 1995, p.88]

If you wander among the graves at Shrapnel Gully Cemetery, Gallipoli, you will find in front of the Stone of Remembrance the Special Memorial to Lieutenant R Empson, Portsmouth Battalion, Royal Naval Division, of Somerset, England. Empson was killed on 1 May 1915 just three weeks short of his nineteenth birthday high up on the ridge at the end of Shrapnel Gully. Few Australians today are aware of the presence on Gallipoli of the men of the Royal Naval Division who fought beside the Anzacs during the Battle of the Landing between 25 April and 3 May 1915.

In drizzling rain during the night of 28-29 April 1915, the exhausted men of the 3rd Brigade AIF, men who had fought their way ashore at dawn on 25 April, were relieved at the front line by the Portsmouth and Chatham Battalions of the Royal Naval Division. Hearing that marines were coming to their aid, the Anzacs believed they would be British regular soldiers from a famous regiment, men who they had been urged to imitate, models of ‘steadiness, order and training’. Bean, however, described these particular marines as raw, untrained, many barely 18, youths – ‘Some had but a few weeks training; most only a few months’. They had expected to go into orderly trenches but found only holes in the ground, hastily dug to protect the Anzacs from Turkish bullets:

From the dark came the distant sounds of Turkish bugle-calls. Close in front of them from the dense scrub flashed the occasional rifles of snipers; overhead the bullets cracked; machine-guns sent the mud of the parapets in showers upon them.

[Charles Bean, The Story of Anzac, Vol 1, Sydney, 1935, p.533]

Among these youngsters filing into these precarious positions was an older recruit, Lance-Corporal Walter Parker, aged 33, from Stapleford, Nottinghamshire.

The Anzac front line, as the marines found it, was merely a series of disconnected pot-holes. The most isolated position lay across 350 metres of open ground and was garrisoned by 60 men led by Lieutenant R Empson. During the afternoon of 30 April, the Turks began vigorous attacks on the marine positions and a number of them were overrun. Empson’s little band was now even more cut off and alone and he sent back a message for urgent relief.

Walter Parker VC, sometime after World War I, shaking hands with King George V. Parker had actually left the services when The King had presented him with his VC at Buckingham Palace on 21 July 1917. [Photograph in Stephen Snelling, VCs of the First World War: Gallipoli, Stroud, 1995, p.93]

A party of marines was detailed to go to Empson’s aid and, when a medic was requested, Lance-Corporal Parker volunteered. Parker had already drawn attention to himself for his brave direction of the battalion stretcher-bearers in battle. As the relief party emerged into the open in the dark, they came under heavy fire, a man was hit, and Parker stayed with him while the others went on. As day dawned Parker realised that to reach Empson he would have to run over open ground totally exposed to Turkish fire. Despite being threatened by an Australian officer that he would shoot him if he did not turn back, Parker leapt from the trench and ran down the slope towards the cut-off position. During his epic run he was twice wounded but reached the trench to the cheers of his comrades. There he learnt that none of the other members of the relief party had got through; they were either dead or wounded or had given up in the face of such murderous fire.

Parker now set about treating the wounded notwithstanding his own injuries. During a full scale Turkish attack, which was beaten back, Lieutenant Empson was killed and command assumed by Lieutenant A Alcock. By the next day, May 2, the little garrison had been reduced to 40 unwounded men and ammunition was running low. Retreat was essential. Again Parker proved himself a brave and capable leader by managing to get all the wounded back safely up the hill in the open through the enemy bullets. During this evacuation, Parker suffered multiple wounds, some of them serious, and he crawled the final few metres to safety.

Parker’s heroism and self-sacrifice had been noticed by many in the Royal Naval Division. He was recommended for the Victoria Cross but the award was only confirmed after a serious of mishaps in June 1917, more than two years after Parker’s time on Gallipoli. By then ill health had forced him to leave the service and for the rest of his life – he died in 1936 aged 55 – he was a semi-invalid due to his war wounds. Parker’s daughter, Vera Constance, born in 1919, was christened in honour of his VC. She recalled the last years of her father’s life:

He was a very sick man for a lot of years … When he knew he was dying, he set out to get my mother a pension. But the authorities said he had survived too long for his death to be have been caused by his war wounds. When his doctor heard, he hit the roof. He said he had treated him and that he was a complete wreck. He said it was a miracle he had lived so long.

[Vera Parker, quoted in Stephen Snelling, VCs of the First World War: Gallipoli, 1995, p.93]

Lance-Corporal Walter Parker VC lies buried in Stapleford Cemetery. In August 2000 Stapleford’s new town square was officially dedicated as the ‘Walter Parker VC Memorial Square’ and a plaque there tells of his deeds on Gallipoli. It makes no bones about the cause of his death – ‘He died in 1936 as a result of his wounds’.

A photograph of Walter parker VC in later life wearing his war medals. The Victoria Cross is on the viewer’s left. In recent years Parker has been remembered in his home town of Stapleford, England, by the naming of the new town square the ‘Walter Parker VC Memorial Square’. Visit the Stapleford town website for further information. [AWM H13928]

Contemporary observers and later historians have not dealt kindly with the Royal Marine Division at Anzac. Lieutenant General William Birdwood, the Anzac Corps commander, himself an Englishman, was particularly scathing describing them as ‘nearly useless’. He can perhaps be excused by the fact that he faced a situation in those early days on the peninsula when the Turks could well have driven the Anzacs into the sea and Birdwood needed the best of troops to assist him, not raw recruits. Recruits could die in battle, however, as well as anyone else.

On 3 May, the Portsmouth Battalion, Parker’s battalion, was ordered forward during the failed attempt by Australians and New Zealanders to capture the ridge line at the end of Monash Valley, the last great Anzac attack of the Battle of the Landing. Charles Bean recorded how the marines were bravely led up the steep slope of Dead Man’s Ridge and how, when they reached the top, they were mown down by the Turkish machine guns ‘with great slaughter’:

For many days afterwards on the ugly bare shoulder at the top of Monash Valley their dead lay like ants shrivelled by a fire, until a marine climbed out at night and pushed them down into the valley, where they were buried. The name 'Dead Man's Ridge’ clung to this shoulder when its origin was almost forgotten.

[Charles Bean, The Story of Anzac, Vol 1, Sydney, 1935, p.533]

The men of the Royal Naval Division were finally withdrawn from Anzac in mid-May. They had played their part in the terrible actions that made up the Battle of the Landing in the most hotly contested central section of the line at the head of Monash Valley. The names of those of them who have no known grave can be found on the British Empire and Dominion memorial to the whole Gallipoli campaign at Cape Helles – the Helles Memorial. The remains of those who were found, like young Lieutenant Empson of the Portsmouth Battalion, lie in the cemeteries of Anzac, a reminder that it was not only the Australians and New Zealanders who fought the Turks on this part of the Gallipoli peninsula. When he came to write the official Australian history of the campaign in the early 1920s Charles Bean summed up the part played by the Royal Naval Division at Anzac in these words:

Young and but partly trained, thrown without preparation into a terrible struggle, over-tried, gallantly but often needlessly exposing themselves, they had suffered heavily, and their dead lay thickly among the Australians and New Zealanders upon those dreadful heights.

[Charles Bean, The Story of Anzac, Vol 1, Sydney, 1935, p.116]

Remembering the men of the Royal Naval Division who fought and died at Anzac brings to mind one of their number who, although he did not ever fight on Gallipoli, was perhaps the best known of them all. On 23 April 1915, Sub-Lieutenant Rupert Brooke, Hood Battalion, Royal Naval Division, destined for Gallipoli, died from blood-poisoning aboard a French hospital ship and was buried on the Greek island of Skyros. Before the full horrors of places like Gallipoli and the Western Front became evident to a new generation of poets, Brooke had written lines which might stand as the epitaph for the English dead of the Royal Naval Division at Gallipoli. Most of them had rushed to volunteer in August 1914 when, it was said, the war would be over by Christmas:

If I should die think only this of me,
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed.
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less,
Gives something back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

[Rupert Brooke, 'The Soldier', The Complete Poems of Rupert Brooke, London, 1933, p.148]