Victims of Gallipoli are remembered

Tim Bradley 07.06.2015 Gallipoli Remembrance Walk to Oldham Parish Church.

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YOUNG and old remembered more than 450 men from Oldham who lost their lives at Gallipoli during the First World War.

An emotional service was held at Oldham Parish Church yesterday to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the ill-fated campaign in Turkey.

Bells rang out as a pipe band led a parade to the church, followed by standard bearers, dignitaries, relatives of those who lost their lives and sea, army and air cadets.

Saddleworth Male Voice Choir performed “Keep the Home Fires Burning” and the rousing “The Soldiers Chorus” as people entered the church.

More than 450 men, aged 17-48 from Oldham, are known to be among the 120,000 who died at Gallipoli.

The heaviest losses were on June 4 at Krithia and the names of the 96 Oldham men who died in the fighting, or from wounds sustained on the day, were read out.

Their names were interspersed with extracts from letters written home by the soldiers which illustrated the scale of the devastating losses.

One told of being “peppered by shrapnel” and continues “it was nothing to see a fellow getting his leg, arm or head blown off”.

Another told how he lay in the battlefield for three hours after being shot and hit by shrapnel. He endured 60 hours in a trench after being rescued and three weeks on a ship during which he contracted blood poisoning.

“It’s a wonder I’m still here to tell this tale,” he said: “I’m sure people will go mad in Oldham when they see the casualty lists — that’s if they publish them.”

Relatives who laid poppies and lit candles to remember their sacrifice included Pauline Cooper, from Royton, who carried a photograph of her great-uncle, Pte Sutcliffe Bairstow, who was 19 when he died on June 4.

She was accompanied by husband Eric, son Richard and nine-year-old grandson Finn, a pupil at Littlemoor Primary School.

Pte Sutcliffe had a brother who died at the Somme and Mrs Cooper said: “I thought the service was lovely. I wanted to come because his older brother had children who remembered him — Sutcliffe hadn’t married, he was only 19.” The service included the emotional song “Bring Him Home” and the playing of “The Last Post”.

There was also a reading of the famous poem “The Soldier” by Rupert Brooke, a Royal Navy volunteer reserve who died of sepsis on his way to Gallipoli, with its moving opening words: “If I should die, think only this of me: that there’s some corner of a foreign field that is for ever England.”

email: karendoherty@oldham-chronicle.co.uk