Visiting Gallipoli today

Courtney's Post was named for Lieutenant-Colonel Richard Courtney, who brought the 14th Battalion AIF to the position on 27 April 1915. It lies along the ridge leading northwards from Lone Pine and on the original front line at Anzac established on the day of the landing. Close by, and slightly to the south-west, was Steel's Post (also known as Steele’s Post) named for Major Thomas Steel, also of the 14th Battalion. Both posts were initially occupied on 25 April 1915 and held until the final evacuation of the Anzac position in December 1915. Charles Bean described Steel’s Post as a steep niche ‘of which the top was a sheer landslide of gravel where a man could scarcely climb on hands and knees’.

After the war, the Imperial War Graves Commission (today the Commonwealth War Graves Commission) created Courtney and Steel’s Post Cemetery in the area of these old Anzac positions. Here lie the remains of 225 Commonwealth servicemen, 160 of whom are unidentified. There are six identified Australian burials in Courtney’s and Steel’s Post and fifty-eight Special Memorials to others believed to be buried here – fifty-four Australians, two Royal Marines, one Royal Navy seaman, and a New Zealand Soldier.

Entrance to Embarkation Pier Cemetery. [DVA]

Position at Steel’s Post showing dugouts on the seaward slope. [AWM G00942]

Steel’s Post showing dugouts on the lower slopes. [AWM A00745]

Steel’s Post prior to the evacuation in December 1915. [AWM A00769]

Courtney’s Post, Horace Moore-Jones. [Watercolour with pencil AWM ART03261]

Canvas camp protected by sandbags at Courtney’s Post, 1915. [AWM H03932]

Courtney’s and Steel’s Post Cemetery. [DVA]

Private Pierce Arthur Goold
3rd Battalion AIF
Plot E, Grave 10

Despite its long exposure to the elements an Australian identity disc found on the remains of a soldier in 1924 was sufficient to identify Private Pierce Goold before his remains were re-interred at Courtney and Steel’s Post. Several years earlier, family members had written to military authorities that his mother, Mary Goold, had been traumatised by the loss of her son and the non-recovery of his remains. Her health was seriously impaired for a number of years. It seems that Mrs Goold had initially learnt of her son’s death from a casualty list published in the Sydney Sunday Sun rather than the usual method of a telegram delivered by a member of the clergy.

After almost nine years, Mary Goold was finally able to put her mind to rest. Her family passed on the official notification from the authorities, that at last her son’s remains had been located and identified. The disc was sent to relatives who later passed it to her. She wrote to thank the staff and expressed her appreciation that she was very pleased to have the disc because of its former intimate association with her son.

When Pierce Goold enlisted in the 3rd Battalion a month after the declaration of war in August 1914, he downplayed his qualifications and abilities. After his death it was revealed that he was a 38-year-old accountant for the legal firm Murphy and Moloney and a student at law, who had founded the NSW Country Storekeeper’s Association and conducted several businesses and not as he stated on his attestation form, a 33-year-old bushman.

Private Goold was at the landing on 25 April 1915 and, within days, reported as missing. Numerous enquiries were made through the Australian Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau with conflicting reports being received. His close friend Corporal Robert Lawson stated that he had last seen him on 27 April 1915 with the New Zealanders. Later, it was reported that Goold had been shot in the leg. Further information came from Sergeant Major Alfred Edwards to the effect that the severely wounded Goold had had to be left on a Turkish trench half way between German Officer’s Trench and Johnson’s Jolly. He believed that Goold almost certainly died shortly afterwards and was buried by the Turks during the armistice of 24 May 1915. His date of death is officially recorded as 29 April 1915.

Grave of Private Pierce Goold, 3rd Battalion AIF, Courtney’s and Steel’s Post Cemetery. [DVA]

Lieutenant Harold Thomas Watkins
13th Battalion AIF
Special Memorial 43

‘The war brought so much sorrow and disappointment’

wrote Mrs Amelia Watkins, the mother of Lieutenant Harold Watkins to the Australian Army after his death,

‘My son was a clever educated lad and science would have been his study’.

Twenty year old Harold Watkins was a 2nd Lieutenant in the 41st (Blue Mountains) Infantry prior to his enlistment in November 1914. An agricultural experimentalist by training he was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant on 1 February 1915 and left Melbourne on the troopship Ulysses on 22 December with the 13th Battalion.

His unit landed on the Gallipoli Peninsula late on the afternoon of 25 April 1915. According to the official history, it was early on the morning of April 26 that the 13th Battalion was sent to Monash Valley to reinforce the 15th and 16th Battalions:

A few short communication trenches, a yard or two in length, were dug to the rear slope of the hill; but that slope was so dangerous that these were mere ‘death-traps’. So perilous was the approach from the rear, that, when once a party was in the line, it was practically cut off except at night … The Turks were close on the other side of the crest, and on April 26th and 27th, in the repeated charges made by the troops at Quinn’s (as also at Courtney’s and Steel’s) to clear their immediate front, Forsythe [Captain William Forsythe] lost two of his subalterns [junior Lieutenants], H T Watkins killed and F G Granger wounded.
[Charles Bean, The Story of Anzac, Volume 2, Canberra, 1924, p.90]

Watkins’ parents, when informed, could not believe that he was either missing or dead when he was initially reported to have been lost between 25 and 28 April. They regularly communicated their dismay and concern at the lack of definite proof of his death to the Army authorities in Melbourne, his mother writing –

‘It is all too painful to be kept in doubt’.

It was later found that Lieutenant Watkins was killed in action on 25 April 1915 and buried the same day between Quinn’s and Courtney’s Posts by the Reverend Andrew Gillison. The letter advising the correct details and date of his death was received by his mother a few hours after her husband passed away in 1924.

In July 1927, his mother again wrote regarding the date of her son’s death –

The wrong date still hurts but you I am sure can understand – my son was a soldier and I, as my husband also was grieved, that the two days desperate fighting has not been added to his brave young life.
[Personal dossier, Lieutenant Harold Thomas Watkins 13th Battalion, Series B2455, National Archives of Australia]

Lieutenant Watkin’s grave was never located but he is believed to be buried in Courtney’s and Steel’s Cemetery where he is commemorated by a Special Memorial carrying the common epitaph chosen for these memorials by the Imperial War Graves Commission: