Winter 2023Rochdale soldier’s memoir of the 1915 Gallipoli Campaign

'Lost Endeavour’, the remarkable memoir of a Rochdale soldier, Private Charles Watkins, has been published, giving readers an honest view of the Gallipoli Campaign, a significant chapter of World War One.

Private Watkins was part of the Rochdale-based 1/6th Battalion Lancashire Fusiliers, which lost over 200 men, and suffered, according to some estimates, between 700 and 800 wounded. They were evacuated from Gallipoli in the early hours of 29 December 1915, a fortnight before the final evacuation of the peninsula.

Fifty years later, Watkins wrote his memoir, a ‘hotch-potch of Gallipoli memories’. Respected author and oral historian at the Imperial War Museum, Peter Hart said the account “brings the life of a private soldier at Gallipoli into sharp focus - the unceasing danger and the terrible privations they endured day after day, week after week and month after month.”

‘Lost Endeavour’ is available directly from Little Gully Publishing or via Amazon.

The second of four children, Charles Watkins was born on 2 November 1895.

He left school at 15, working at the Turner Brothers cotton mill before volunteering for the Territorial Force when he was 17. War, he said, was a “welcome escape” from hard labour in the mill.

Watkins joined the 1/6th Battalion on 7 May 1913, and sailed for the Dardanelles in 1915. After a short period in Egypt, the battalion was sent to the Western Front, but Watkins remained behind in Egypt, where he entered the Royal Flying Corps, which he described as “the most enjoyable time of the war.”

After the war, Watkins married and had four children. He died on 5 January 1989, aged 93.