As the Australian nurses arrived on the northern Aegean Island of Lemnos in August 1915 they were welcomed by the sound of a musical instrument dear to my heart – the bagpipe. This is the story of the piper of Lemnos and his other fellow Scots who came to Lemnos and Gallipoli as Anzacs. Their story is also the story of Australia and migration, a point of connection between Australia’s Hellenic and Scots communities.
One of the fascinating aspects of the Lemnos story is how much it contains the story of migration. Approximately 30 per cent of those who served in the Australian Imperial Force in the First World War were born overseas. One of these was the sole Hellenic Anzac to be killed at Gallipoli, Private Peter Rados, the digger from Artaki near the Sea of Marmara in Asia Minor. But most of the overseas born Australians hailed from what is now the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. And of course, this includes many who were born on the land of my own birth, Scotland.
Over 9,600 Scots served in the AIF, from Glasgow and Edinburgh to the highlands and Islands. The Australian National Archives reveals that over 50 came from Orkney and over 70 from Shetland. Even Dennistoun – the Glasgow suburb where I was born – was the birthplace of four diggers. These Scots came to Australia before the war for a new life and ended up enlisting. For those who joined in the early months of the war, their enlistment would bring them to Lemnos and Gallipoli. Sadly I often find that the story of these Scots of the diaspora is often overlooked in the commemorative story of their homeland.
One Scottish digger whose presence on Lemnos would be captured in a memorable photograph was Archibald Monk. When he arrived on Lemnos Archibald was a Warrant Officer with the 3rd Australian General Hospital. While he had departed with the unit from Australia, Archibald hailed from the distant island of Benbecula, located off the West Coast of Scotland. Benbecula was an Island connecting North and South Uist in the Outer Hebrides. Inhabited by Gaelic-speaking people, the Island is called Beinn na Faoghla in Scots Gaelic, which means Mountain of the Ford.
Like most migrants, he appears to have left the hard life of an islander for new opportunities beyond, first as a soldier in the Cameron Highlanders and then to Sydney, where he was working as a hospital assistant in the years before the war. Family lore tells that one day Archibald stopped ploughing the fields and left Benbecula, seeking his fortune on the mainland. His father is said to have scolded him on his departure.
He was also familiar with the Scottish bagpipes and was of such proficiency that by the time he landed on Lemnos’ Turks Head Peninsula in early August, Archibald had become the hospital’s piper. It was Archibald that met both groups of Australian nurses when they landed on Lemnos a few days later, the archives recording that “Piper Monk” met the nurses and proceeded to “march them in” from the landing pier to the camp site. I wonder what the local islanders would have thought of the strange and distinctive droning sound of the Scottish bagpipes as their music floated across hills surrounding Mudros Bay. Maybe they thought it was a Hellene playing the gaida, one of the family of the instrument stretching back to the ancient askaulos.
It was this scene that was captured by Albert Savage, an orderly with the hospital who would become its photographer. There stands Archibald, in shorts and slouch hat, bagpipes in hand, the drones over his shoulder, with the Allied ships in Mudros Bay beyond. This highland welcome to Lemnos would contrast with the horrors that the hospital staff would face as the thousands of wounded and sick poured into the hospital in the days following their arrival.
Piper Monk served alongside at least one other Scot at the 3rd AGH, Staff Nurse Mary Ann Bett. She was a 34 year old nurse who had trained at Melbourne’s Austin Hospital. Born in Dundee, Mary Ann was living in Footscray in Victoria when she enlisted on May 10 1915. She boarded the troopship Mooltan on May 18 1915, joining Matron Grace Wilson and the other nurses who had sailed with her from Sydney. She would serve throughout war until her discharge on October 2 1918, having gotten married.
A Scot who came to Lemnos after the evacuation of the Peninsula was James Brass, an Able Bodied Driver with the Royal Australian Naval Bridging Train. With blue eyes and auburn hair, James was a master mariner who had been born in Stromness on the Island of Orkney, north of the Scottish mainland. He had enlisted at Melbourne in May 1915 and arrived at Lemnos on July 21 1915 before making his way to Suvla Bay on the Peninsula. James spent a few weeks camped on the shores of Mudros Bay before departing with the rest of his unit from Lemnos’ Mudros Bay on January 20 1916. James was one of the last Australian troops to depart Gallipoli.
Six Scottish diggers remain on Lemnos to this day, buried in its military cemeteries. Private Kennett Cameron and Lance Corporal John McPhail, the former serving with the 4th Battalion and latter with the 6th Battalion, both hailed from Ross-shire. Privates Ernest Dingwall and James Edgar both served with the 19th Battalion, the former having been born in Inverness and the latter Letham in Forfarshire. Brighton’s 6th Brigade commander 56-year-old Colonel Richard Linton born at Dalton in Dumfrieshire (from where some of my own ancestors were born) was killed along with the brothers Privates James and Thomas Sloan of the 21st Battalion (both born in Galsgow as I was) as a result of the torpedoing of their troopship the Southland near Lemnos in September 1915.
One of the earliest Scottish burials on Lemnos was that of Corporal John Park. John would serve at Gallipoli with other Anzacs from Orkney. Men like Privates James Millar from Kirkwall of the 5th Battalion and Thomas Johnston from the village of Orphir who served in the 23rd Battalion, both of whom would survive Gallipoli only after suffering wounds or illness.
John was born on Burray, one of the Orkney’s many islands. When he enlisted into the 2nd Battalion on August 26 1914 at Randwick in Sydney, 29-year-old John listed his previous military service with the Edinburgh-based Kings Own Scottish Borderers regiment – one in which my own maternal grandfather served before and during the war.
He departed Australia from Sydney on October 18 1914 aboard the troopship Suffolk on a journey that would take him first to Alexandria and from their across the eastern Mediterranean and the Aegean, passing the islands of Cos, Patmos and Samos on the way to Lemnos. One wonders what the Orcadian Islander John thought of the Islands of the Aegean as he passed these Islands in early summer. Would he have saw the local fishermen playing their caique fishing boats across the waters, reminding him of the little herring boats of his native Burray.
He arrived at Mudros Bay on the morning of April 8, where they would practice alongside the thousands of other troops assembling here for the coming landings. John would depart Lemnos and take part in the landings at Anzac on the morning of April 25. While John survived the landings, he would be fatally wounded on June 13. He died at the 2nd Australian Stationary Hospital at Lemnos on June 15 and was buried at East Mudros Military Cemetery.
I wonder what John would have made of Lemmos, located on the edge of Greece, with its fishing boats and ancient history, including the ancient heritage sites of Poliochni and Ifestia. He had come from an Island on the edge of Scotland, making its living from agriculture and fishing. And Orkney was one of the oldest settlements in the whole United Kingdom, with some dating, back more than 8,500 years. The connection between John’s island and Australia would continue into the 1930’s with the work of an Australian archaeologist – Professor V. Gordon Childe – who would reveal Orkney’s famous Neolithic settlement at Skara Brae.
And of course, there would be many more, descendents of Scottish migrants who served on Lemnos and some would remain there, such as Corporal George Finley Knight, the electrician from Albert Park whose father had immigrated to Australia from Broughty Ferry in rural Angus.
And so the story of Lemnos’ connection to Anzac is also a migration story. It reflects the fact that Australia is an immigrant nation. Some fifty thousand Australians served at Gallipoli, many of these migrants from many lands, almost all of whom came to Lemnos for greater or lesser periods of time. Like the Hellenic Anzac Private Peter Rados, these Scots had come to Australia for a better life, on a journey that would bring them to this Aegean Island – where one would play his bagpipes – and where some of them remain to this day.
Jim Claven OAM is a trained historian, freelance writer and published author. He has written the first major historical account of Lemnos’ role in Gallipoli- Lemnos & Gallipoli Revealed – A Pictorial History of the Anzacs in the Aegean, 1915-16 – with a follow up volume detailing the role of the nearby Island of Imbros recently released, From Imbros Over The Sea. He was born in Glasgow and immigrated to Australia with his family in 1968. He can be contacted via email – jimclaven@yahoo.com.au