The First World War: Churchill’s Calamity (Part 6)

**Dominic Sandbrook** (0:12)
My dearest son, I received your very kind and welcome letter, dated April 23rd yesterday, and I was very thankful for it. But my dear lad, it was a very great disappointment to me that you were not sent to either France or England as you expected. But I read later on that a fleet had been sent to the Dardanelles, and I made sure that it was the Australians, and I was right. Well, my son, the Australians have done gloriously. They have made England ring with their bravery. Mr. Asquith said in the House of Commons, that the Australians had fought like heroes, and that they had surpassed themselves in the annals of British warfare with their bravery. Jack, my son, my heart is fairly bursting with sorrow and with pride to think that you are amongst such a lot of brave men. Now my dearest son, hoping and trusting that the Lord in his great mercy will guard and protect you in these terrible times, and that he will hear my prayers for you from your ever loving and affectionate mother.
So that was Sarah Fitzpatrick, a widow who lived in South Shields in Tyne and Wear in Northern England. Despite that, she was, as you could tell from my expert accent and work there, Scottish and she was writing to her son Jack in May 1915
This letter that she wrote to Jack was found on Jack's body after he was killed by machine gunfire at Anzac Cove on the 19th of May 1915 He was one of perhaps 150,000 men who died on the killing fields of Glippoli, but he may well be the most famous. Dominic, why, for those who are not Australian, why is he so famous?

**Tom Holland** (2:15)
The answer is that even though he was born to Scottish parents and he grew up in the northeast of England, Jack Fitzpatrick, as he was born, became one of the most celebrated Australians of the century. When he was 17, he ran away and joined the Merchant Navy and then he deserted when he got to New South Wales and he became a coal miner and a gold digger and a ship stoker and all these kinds of odd jobs. And then when war broke out in 1914, he enlisted in the 3rd Field Ambulance of the Australian Imperial Force but under his mother's maiden name, so he called himself John Simpson.
And he thought, as you can tell from his mother's letter, that he would be going back to England or to France. But as we heard last time, the Australians were in fact sent to Gallipoli. And there this guy, born Fitzpatrick but now calling himself Simpson, he became famous for using donkeys to carry wounded Anzacs down from the ravines on the front line back down to the beach. And he became a kind of cult hero for the Anzacs with his donkeys. He was said to have rescued 300 men.
And then a month into the operation on the 19th of May, he is shot and he becomes a sort of patriotic martyr. So in Anzac mythology, he becomes, he's a poor boy who's made good. He is an every man who has sacrificed himself for his mates. And of course, this image of somebody with a donkey, it kind of plays into established images of saintly figures or martyrs or sires who are traveling by donkey or by mule or whatever. And so he becomes the supreme embodiment, the incarnation of something that was created at Gallipoli, which is the Anzac spirit. So if you look him up in the Australian dictionary of biography, it says of him, Simpson and his donkey became a legend, the symbol of all that was pure, selfless and heroic on Gallipoli.
So he is the Anzac spirit made flesh, Tom. That's why he's so celebrated.

**Dominic Sandbrook** (4:15)
And Carnet.

**Tom Holland** (4:16)
Exactly. And we'll come back to the Anzac spirit and how that was created and what all this meant for Australian national identity later in this episode. But maybe first we should remind ourselves, what on earth are tens of thousands of Australians and New Zealanders, as well as hundreds of thousands of British and Irish soldiers, and in total, almost 80,000 Frenchmen? What are they doing on the coast of Turkey in the spring of 1915?

**Dominic Sandbrook** (4:40)
Nothing useful.

**Tom Holland** (4:41)
Well, I mean, I don't want to diss their contribution, but they have been thrown away in a very misguided operation. So an operation conceived by the first Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, to force the Dardanelles, the straits between Europe and Asia, the straits that lead from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea. He thinks he's going to force the straits with his ships. He's going to bombard Constantinople, knock the Ottomans out of the war. The naval campaign doesn't work. The Asquith government doubles down. They send ground troops to take the European shore of the strait, the peninsula of Gallipoli.