Gallipoli descendants to meet Prince Harry, Prince Charles

Prince Charles, Prince of Wales and his youngest son, Prince Harry. Photo / Getty

Descendants of British veterans who took part in the doomed World War I campaign at Gallipoli have been invited to join the Prince of Wales and his son Prince Harry at a centenary commemoration event in Turkey later this month.

Fifteen descendants, all members of the Gallipoli Association in the UK, will pay tribute at a ceremony at the Helles Memorial on April 24.

The following day, Anzac Day, the princes will join 10,500 Turks, Kiwis, and Australians at a dawn service on the Gallipoli peninsula to remember the April 25, 1915 landings a century on.

The disastrous campaign cost 29,134 British lives, the French approximately 9800, the Australians 8520, New Zealanders 2806 and the Indians 1891.

A total of 56,643 Ottomans were killed defending their homeland before the Allies pulled out of the bloody stalemate at the end of 1915.

Gallipoli Association chairman Captain Christopher Fagan told the Daily Mail it was a "great honour" to have been invited by the UK Government to attend the service at Cape Helles.

Lyn Edmonds, from Godmanchester, Cambridgeshire, will trace the journey of her grandfather, Private Benjamin Hurt, the Mail reported.

The Derbyshire soldier, who signed up aged 17 and fought with the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, landed on April 25, 1915 and remained there until January 1916, despite being injured only weeks into the campaign.

Of the 1012 members of his battalion who landed at Gallipoli, fewer than 100 remained when the unit was withdrawn early the following year.

"It will be a privilege and emotional experience to be there to remember my grandfather exactly 100 years later and on the very spot where he landed under fire," Mrs Edmonds told the Mail.

"He was so fortunate to have survived the terrible campaign and I will naturally be thinking of his many friends who did not return."