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The Nek Cemetery
From Quinn’s Post Cemetery the road heads north towards the Turkish 57th Regiment Memorial. Shortly after that an unmade track to the left leads to The Nek Cemetery and, at the very end of the ridge, Walker’s Ridge Cemetery overlooking North Beach and all the country to the north of Anzac towards Suvla Bay. The narrow ridge, running from the Nek Cemetery to Baby 700, was reached by Australian soldiers of the 12th Battalion early on the morning of the landing but it was not held as the Turks drove the Anzacs back to a line to the west of where The Nek Cemetery is today. Early on the morning of 7 August 1915, the men of the 3rd Australian Light Horse Brigade, the 8th and 10th Light Horse Regiments, in four successive waves, made a valiant but futile attempt to seize the Turkish trenches below Baby 700. This charge resulted in the virtual annihilation of these units and this story featured in Peter Weir’s famous film Gallipoli released in 1982.
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- Scattered skeletal remains were found by official historian Charles Bean when he visited The Nek battlefield in early 1919. A Turkish memorial is seen in the background. [AWM P03631-228]
Five Australians are commemorated in this cemetery by Special Memorials. Of these, four died on 7 August 1915 during the charge of the 8th Light Horse (Victoria) and 10th Light Horse (Western Australia). The only identified Australian grave here is that of Private Alexander Campbell, 12th Battalion, who died the day of the landing, 25 April 1915, as his unit fought their way along Russell’s Top towards Baby 700. Four New Zealanders of the Otago Regiment, who died in early May 1915 during the Battle of the Landing, are also buried at The Nek.
In early 1919, when official historian Charles Bean visited Gallipoli the remains of more than three hundred men who had died in the 7 August charge were found on a piece of land the size of three tennis courts. These 316 unidentified soldiers, the majority of whom were Australian Light Horsemen, lie under the grass at The Nek.
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- Aerial view of The Nek cemetery, June 1923. [AWM H18635]
To read more about the events that took place here, see the The Nek section of the Anzac Walk on this site.
Official CWGC grave
listings for 
The Nek Cemetery (External link)
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- Signpost directing visitors to The Nek and Walker’s Ridge.[DVA]
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- View from the cemetery north to Suvla Bay. [DVA]
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- Visitors to the Turkish memorial at The Nek. [DVA]
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- Entrance to The Nek Cemetery. [DVA]
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- View of the memorial at the Nek. [DVA]
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- Memorial stone at The Nek commemorating 321 soldiers of the British forces who died at The Nek. [DVA]
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- Portrait of Alexander Campbell, 12th Battalion whose remains were located nearly a decade after his death. – [Western Mail 9 July 1915 p26]
Private Alexander Campbell
12th Battalion, AIF.
Row A, Grave 13
Tasmanian-born railway clerk Alexander Campbell upheld a family tradition of military service even before his enlistment in the 12th Battalion, AIF, having served in the 93rd Battalion Senior Cadets and the 93rd Derwent Infantry. Private Campbell was reported missing on the day of the landing. Following a Board of Enquiry held in 1916 he was found to have been killed in action on that day, just one month short of his twentieth birthday. For a number of years his mother wrote numerous letters to Base Records in Melbourne, inquiring if his remains had been located.
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- The sole identified grave in this cemetery is that of Private Alexander Campbell, 12th Battalion. [DVA]
Nearly a decade after his death, his mother was sent his identity disc that had been recovered when his body was located and re-interred in the cemetery at The Nek. She wrote:
As a mother my heart is very full, and I do value the disc above every thing, for he wore it, - Ah!! How different it looks now, to what it did when my dear boy first showed it to me.
When she completed her son’s Honour Roll Circular for the Australian War Memorial in the 1920s, she wrote that when her underage son had asked for her consent to join the AIF he had said:
Mother, remember I am a Campbell. No mother of a Campbell has ever said ‘no’ for her son to fight for his country.
The epitaph she chose for his grave is:
Till he come.
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- Portrait Trooper Raymond Howell, 10th Light Horse [Western Mail, 17 September 1915 p23]
Trooper Geoffrey Castell Howell
Trooper Raymond Howell
10th Light Horse Regiment, AIF
Special Memorials 1 & 2
The attempt by the Australian Lighthorsemen to take Baby 700 on 7 August 1915 was aimed to divert Turkish attention from other attacks further north by the New Zealanders at Chunuk Bair. Pre-attack shelling had failed to destroy the Turkish trenches opposite them at the Nek, and the first wave of the 8th Australian Light Horse Regiment was ordered over the top of their trench into certain death from a fusillade of Turkish fire. In less then half a minute the men were cut down within five to ten metres of their own trench. Two minutes later a second wave of the 8th met the same fate. A survivor of the second wave was Lieutenant Walter McConnan who wrote to his father of the attack:
That morning (7th August) when waiting for the word to leave the trenches and when listening to the volume of fire the first line drew, I reckoned the game was up. When climbing out the best I hoped for was a quick passage …The Turks were heavily entrenched on the field in front of us and the position was heavily bombarded by our naval and field guns. At 4:30 a.m. Saturday my regiment left cover to be supported by the 10th and 9th. Instead of a soft snap as many of us thought we had to climb into the hottest fire you could imagine.
[Lieutenant Walter Alexander McConnan, 8th Australian Light Horse, PR01577, AWM]
The third wave, consisting of men of the 10th Light Horse, moved into position and at 4.45 a.m. climbed over the parapet into the same deadly fire and, as Charles Bean wrote:
… went forward to meet death instantly, as the 8th had done. The men running as swiftly and as straight as they could at the Turkish rifles.
[C E W Bean, Official History of Australia in the War of 1914 – 1918, Volume II, p.617]
Following a confusion of orders a fourth wave of the 10th ran forward and:
… was also cut to pieces and the attack failed. The majority are still lying out between ours and the enemy trenches in heaps.
[Lieutenant Walter Alexander McConnan, 8th Australian Light Horse, PR01577, AWM]
A Board of Enquiry held two days after the battle found that those still missing had been killed in action. It is not known if the two Troopers Howell, killed in the attack and who had only arrived on the Gallipoli Peninsula on 5 August, were related. Raymond Howell’s younger brother, Francis George Howell, who also served with the 10th Light Horse, died in Egypt in December 1917 from the effects of a bullet wound.
Commonwealth
War Graves Commission Website and "Debt of Honour" Register