Oh...my...God.
I cannot believe what I have just found when going through (my admittedly meager amount of) family documents this afternoon. No less than a photocopy of Bill Adam's four and a half page letter home recounting his experience of the invasion of Gallipoli. It is written afterwards on Lemnos Island, dated Saturday April 24 - Sunday June 6th, 1915. Bill (William Pitt Adams), was my great-grandmother's younger brother, and as she was the only girl, and the eldest, the boys all had a particular affection for her. Thank goodness she kept all the postcards and letters from them over the years, and thank goodness my grandmother then kept them after her. I weep to think what has been thrown away when attics and houses were cleared by people who look upon old letters as rubbish.
Back to today's treasure though: Bill Adams, fighting with the Australian Forces, was there on the 25th of April landing at what later came to be known as Anzac Cove. Gallipoli is now regarded as one of the greatest tragedies of modern armed conflict, and equally, a symbol of the stupidity of war. And here was this young man from Bournemouth, about to step into the mouth of hell, comparing his first sight of the cliffs of the Turkish coast with those of his lovely seaside home town. He survived, and this letter somehow got past the"Censor", and a copy of it survives one hundred years later. *
I don't know who made the copy of it I now have, or where the original is, but they enlarged it onto paper that does not fit my scanner (longer than 14 inches), so I will take it to work sometime and make a better copy for the blog to replace this one.
[*May 1 - heard from Cousin C. in Australia that she has the original copy (Bill was her grandfather), and that the letter came home with him: it was never posted. End of that mystery, and a perfect one too.]
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