The First Anzac at Gallipoli
Britain’s Royal Navy was in charge of landing the first Australians and New Zealanders at Gallipoli on April 25 1915. From their troop transport ships, the men were loaded into smaller boats which were towed as close to the beach as possible. The steam-powered ‘picket’ boats which towed them were commanded by teenage Navy midshipmen like 15-year-old Eric Bush, who was responsible for getting about 200 Anzacs ashore. Among the first Australians to land was Private James Bostock, who recalls how he jumped overboard and waded onto the beach at what would soon be known as Anzac Cove. Both men were recorded in 1955 for a BBC radio documentary marking the 40th anniversary of the landings.
Year:1915 (Recorded 1955)
Location:Gallipoli Peninsula, Turkey
The First Anzac at Gallipoli
Britain’s Royal Navy was in charge of landing the first Australians and New Zealanders at Gallipoli on April 25 1915. From their troop transport ships, the men were loaded into smaller boats which were towed as close to the beach as possible. The steam-powered ‘picket’ boats which towed them were commanded by teenage Navy midshipmen like 15-year-old Eric Bush, who was responsible for getting about 200 Anzacs ashore. Among the first Australians to land was Private James Bostock, who recalls how he jumped overboard and waded onto the beach at what would soon be known as Anzac Cove. Both men were recorded in 1955 for a BBC radio documentary marking the 40th anniversary of the landings.
Year: 1915 (Recorded 1955)
Length: 04:34
Production Company: BBC Transcription Service
Credits: Narrated by: Ewen Solon, Produced by: John Bridges
Source: Radio New Zealand Collection, Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision
Catalogue Reference: 32681 Stories of Gallipoli. 1955
People: Eric Wheeler Bush, James Dundee Bostock
Location: Gallipoli Peninsula, Turkey
Image Title: Australian troops being towed ashore in lighters to land at Anzac Cove, Gallipoli. In the background is the transport ship. (Australian War Memorial)
Image Source: Courtesy: Australian War Memorial, https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/C01890/
When the first boatloads of Australians landed at Gallipoli around 4:20am on April 25 1915, it was still dark. There has been much debate over the intervening hundred years about who was first to the beach.
Lieutenant Duncan Chapman, commanding the 3rd Platoon of Queensland’s 9th Battalion, has been cited as a strong contender for that title, and was named as first ashore by writer Charles Bean in his official history of the Anzacs. Sadly, Duncan Chapman did not survive the war to talk about his part in the invasion, as he was killed by a shell the following year at Pozières in France. However, in a letter from Gallipoli to his brothers, Chapman said he was in the bow of the first boat and therefore was the first to land. “To me was given the extreme honour of being actually the first man to put foot ashore on this peninsula, to lead a portion of the men up the hill in that now historic charge.”(1)
18 year old Queensland farmworker James Bostock came ashore in the same boat as Chapman, and after the war he confirmed on several occasions that his platoon commander was the first to jump overboard and land on the beach. As Bostock was Chapman’s signaller, he was close behind him, and therefore his own claim to have been among the first to land is also probably correct.
The Australians kept landing throughout the morning of the 25th, with the first New Zealanders coming ashore around 11am, led by the Auckland and Canterbury battalions.
A statue of Duncan Chapman is being erected in his hometown of Maryborough, Queensland to mark the centenary of the Gallipoli landings.
1. Duncan Chapman, Letter to his brother Charles, 1915. Reprinted in The Brisbane Telegraph, 06 Jan 1934.