On 25 April 2015 – Anzac Day – the University of Southampton and the National Museum of the Royal Navy will mark precisely one hundred years since Allied forces landed on the Gallipoli peninsula.
This audacious attempt to seize Turkish fortifications and secure control of the Dardanelles proved a costly failure. The losses sustained at Gallipoli famously helped forge Australia and New Zealand as sovereign nations independent of Great Britain, and yet the ‘mother country’ provided the bulk of the invasion force. Across the eight months of the campaign the Hampshire Regiment was prominent in the fighting, with the 2nd Battalion on day one wading ashore at V Beach from the steamship River Clyde. A study day at Portsmouth’s Historic Dockyard will examine what connects the Gallipoli campaign and the south of England, in particular Hampshire. As well as focusing upon the conflict itself, speakers will consider how failure at the Dardanelles was perceived after the war, not least in the south coast county on which ‘Johnny Turk’ had inflicted such heavy casualties.
Programme:
Professor Adrian Smith [Professor of Modern History, University of Southampton] and Dr Duncan Redford [Senior Research Fellow, NMRN] – Welcome and introduction
Dr Chris Prior [Lecturer in Twentieth Century History, University of Southampton] – Scene-setting, placing the presence of the three Hampshire battalions in the context of an imperial taskforce, as annually acknowledged on Anzac Day
Major [rtd.] Roger W. Coleman MBE [author/Western Front Association/Royal Hampshire Regiment Museum] – The Hampshire Regiment at Gallipoli
Professor Mark Connelly [Professor of Modern British History, University of Kent] – Tell England (Anthony Asquith, BIF, 1931): a depiction in fiction and on the screen of soldiers from southern England fighting on the Dardanelles
Mr Matthew Sheldon [Executive Director of Heritage, NMRN] – HMS M.33 at Gallipoli and afterwards. Introduced by Ms Jo Bailey [Hampshire Cultural Trust]
Tour of NMRN special exhibition: ‘Gallipoli: Myth and Memory’
Professor Adrian Smith [Professor of Modern History, University of Southampton]– conclusion to the day
Further information and booking details can be found here
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