JACK RYAN REMEMBER HIS COUSIN JAMES RYAN

JACK RYAN REMEMBER HIS COUSIN JAMES RYAN

It took 75 years, but 95-year-old Anzac veteran Jack Ryan returned to Gallipoli in 1990 to commemorate his cousin, James Ryan, who died there in 1915. 

Jack stands at the Lone Pine Memorial that lists 4,900 missing Anzacs who have no known grave. 

Jack’s pilgrimage illustrates that the passage of time never completely extinguishes grief, and that a sense of connection always remains for lost loved ones. 

Patsy Adam-Smith observed this connection, when, as a young girl, she entered her grandmother’s room unexpectedly at night. In the half-light, she found her kneeling below a family portrait, praying for her two sons who had gone missing at Lone Pine. 

Patsy recalled that her grandmother never mentioned the boys to a soul until the declaration of the Second World War, when she said, ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if they found the boys wandering around— and they got their memories back!’ 

Patsy visited Gallipoli in the 1970s to commemorate her uncles.

Cherie Elliott was born in 1922, seven years after her mother, Irene, lost her brothers, Mordaunt and Lindsay, at the Gallipoli landing. Cherie felt that a heavy shadow hung over her family in the 1920s and 1930s. 

As a little girl, she prayed for the souls of her uncles at bedtime, closing with, ‘Please let there not be any other wars.’ 

Cherie visited Gallipoli in 1983. While walking the gullies and ravines, she sensed her uncles’ presence. And while standing in the Lone Pine Cemetery, Cherie could look toward Lindsay’s pedestal headstone, and then across to Mordaunt’s name inscribed on the nearby memorial wall. 

Photograph credit: Vedat Acikalin