Retracing footsteps of grandpa at Anzac Cove

ANZAC: Grant Harper, Rathkeale College deputy principal, with a Gallipoli keepsake he gathered during a trip to Turkey last month and a photograph of Anzac Cove by his late serviceman grandfather Charles Goldstone during World War I. PHOTO/LYNDA FERINGA

Rathkeale College deputy principal Grant Harper last month retraced the footsteps of his late Anzac grandfather, standing where he stood at Gallipoli almost a century ago and returning home with a rock gathered from where he bled.

His grandfather, Charles Goldstone, had been working as a shepherd in the back blocks of northern Hawke's Bay at the outbreak of World War I and "with two mates rode his horse down" to enlist at Linton near Palmerston North.

He was assigned to a unit "looking after horses" and first hit foreign soil with the First New Zealand Expeditionary Force in Egypt, Mr Harper said.

Mr Goldstone spent four years and 83 days away from his Hawkes Bay home, Mr Harper said, during which time he fought and was injured at Gallipoli and at the Somme and Passchendaele. He received terrible shrapnel wounds on the Western Front and was forced to recover in a British hospital bunk for almost a year before his demobilisation.

"That's an extraordinary length of time for a young guy who went off thinking he was just going for a bit of an adventure."

His grandfather came home a Lance Corporal and was awarded a medal for bravery, Mr Harper said, but had "never" spoken of his battlefield experiences.

At the death of his mother last year, Mr Harper said, he discovered photographs his grandfather had taken as a soldier and found "many were taken at Gallipoli and in Egypt - swimming in the Mediterranean and at the races and the polo at Alexandria".

Mr Harper travelled to Turkey while holidaying in July and earlier this month and had "copied some of pop's photographs and taken them with me and was able to compare his shots of Anzac Cove with what's there now".

Another photograph that made for poignant memories of his trip was a mystery shot "looking across arid hills from a high point somewhere".

"So I asked our guide if he recognised the location and he took us to a place between Lone Pine and Chunuk Bair called The Nek and I literally stood in the trench where pop had taken that photograph looking sort of north across to Suvla Bay."

Mr Harper, who first started at Rathkeale College in 1967 "as a boy" and returned as a housemaster in 1982, said he also picked up a rock from Anzac Cove as a keepsake of his "special visit".