Woman’s visit to war hero’s grave still a mystery

Ninety years ago, as Allied troops struggled to live through the bitter fighting on the Gallipoli Peninsula, talk of a visit to the battle zone by a mystery woman swept through the ranks.

Suddenly, said Hamilton author and historian Richard Stowers, they had something to talk about other than the war.

The identity of the woman was still a mystery 90 years later, he said.

Stowers said the woman's visit to a war hero's solitary grave was probably the only time a woman ever stepped ashore during the eight months of bitter fighting which cost more than 40,000 Allied lives.

At the launch last week of his book Bloody Gallipoli, the New Zealanders' Story, at the opening of a Gallipoli display at the Auckland War Memorial and Museum, Stowers said the mystery woman may have been war hero Lieutenant Colonel Charles Doughty-Wylie's wife or his lover.

She stepped ashore near Cape Helles on the southern end of the peninsula and without speaking to anyone marched up to his grave, knelt for some time, then stood, placed a wreath on the wooden cross, and left.

Doughty-Wylie, 46, from the Royal Welch Fusiliers, was awarded the Victoria Cross after he died on April 26, 1915, leading an attack on a Turkish position on Hill 161.

He died the day after the first of the Anzac troops landed at Anzac Cove, further up the peninsula.

Stowers said the news of her visit soon found its way around Gallipoli and gave the soldiers a topic of conversation other than the war.

Her identity was never discovered.

"She may have been Doughty-Wylie's wife, Lillian, who was nursing with the French Hospital service in France.

"Or maybe she was Gertrude Bell, the English writer and historian, who was Doughty-Wylie's lover."

- NZPA