He captained the Original All Blacks, but there was another side to David Gallaher.
His role in World War I is one of more than 140,000 stories of New Zealanders documented in a huge interactive archive launched in Canberra yesterday.
Gallaher captained the All Blacks team that toured Britain, France and North America in 1905-06. He lied about his age to join the Boer War in 1901, before later volunteering for World War I, fighting with the New Zealand 22nd Reinforcements in 1917. He was fatally wounded later that year at Passchendaele.
The service records of Gallaher and the 100,000 other New Zealanders who fought, and another 40,000 Kiwis who supported their efforts at home and abroad, are part of the website commemorating the centenary of the start of the Great War. A joint effort between Archives New Zealand and the National Archives of Australia, the website brings together more than 600,000 service records of WWI soldiers, munitions workers, merchant marines, nurses and others who helped the Anzacs.
NAA director-general David Fricker said it shone a rare light on the human faces of the Great War.
