Big crowds turned out Down Under last week to mark the centennial of the First World War’s ill-fated Gallipoli campaign — and thanks to the sleuthing of a Victoria man, an artifact of that battle got back to Australia just in time.
Steve Clifford is a B.C. government systems analyst by day, military researcher by night.
A few years ago, his hunt for the background on more than a dozen relatives who served in the Great War morphed into a sideline where he performs the same service for others.
It’s not the battles or the big-picture history that intrigue him, but the soldiers themselves. “My interest is in the individuals and trying to find their stories.”
One day in 2013, while poking around in Victoria’s Command Post militaria store, the owners pulled him aside. “They said: ‘Steve, we’ve got something we have to show you.’ ”
It was a flag, obviously old, a little moth-eaten, bearing a large red cross and faded markings indicating it belonged to C Section of the 3rd Field Ambulance in April 1915.
Intrigued, Clifford took some iPhone photos, then hit the Internet. He eventually found an Australian war diary whose records showed that a unit of that name landed right behind the first battalion to land at Gallipoli, Turkey, on April 25, 1915.
Clifford also found a book in which an officer mentioned seeing a flag of that description during the battle.
“It was something unexpected to find in a shop in Victoria,” he says.
Meanwhile, the Command Post’s owners did some investigating of their own: A history of the 3rd Field Ambulance referred to a flag being presented to the unit’s commanding officer, Douglas McWhae, by a private named A. D. Kemp in 1918.
Clifford tracked down some Australian archival documents bearing Kemp’s signature, which he then matched to the faded, fragmented writing on the flag. “If you knew what your were looking for, you could make it out.”
Clifford blogged about the find on his doingourbit.wordpress.com site, hoping the post would stir some interest in Australia. Unfortunately, few seemed to notice.
When an Edmonton collector bought the flag for $25,000 US last June, it seemed like the end of the story, but Clifford wasn’t happy. He thought the flag belonged back in Australia, not Canada.
As it turns out, the purchaser, Doug Buhler, came to feel the same way as he learned more about its history. “I felt a sense of guilt that this flag was in a Canadian private collection when it should be on display for all Australians,” he wrote in his own blog post.
Then, in late 2014, Clifford heard from Wendy Lugg of the Royal Western Australia Historical Society, who had finally seen his almost-year-old blog entry. “I could tell immediately she was the one I wanted to make contact with,” Clifford says. “She was excited.” It was known that McWhae had taken the flag to Western Australia at war’s end, but no one knew what had happened to it after that.
Clifford introduced Lugg to Buhler, who readily agreed to send the flag to Australia on loan, with the idea that it would eventually be bought through a crowdfunding campaign. About a month ago, Lugg flew from Perth to Edmonton, grabbed the banner, then hopped right back on a plane for the return flight.
By April 20, it was on display in an exhibit in Western Australia, just in time for the Gallipoli centennial April 25. That’s a date every Aussie and Kiwi now knows as ANZAC Day, marking a national coming-of-age. (In Canadian terms, think of Vimy Ridge combined with Dieppe.)
In the meantime, the Vancouver man who sold the flag to the Victoria shop emerged to say how he had come by it. As a teen in Australia in 1983, he found the flag while cleaning out an old aquatic centre in Perth. Told to chuck it in the trash, he kept it instead.
Clifford is glad that the flag didn’t get tossed back then, and that it boomeranged back to Australia after emerging in Canada.
“I’m very happy that it’s back there.”
Australian authorities have made a point of praising the Victoria man, whose great-great-uncle died at Gallipoli while serving in a Scottish regiment.
Clifford is continuing his research into First World War soldiers. “I get caught up in these other people’s lives and think: ‘I’m so lucky.’ ”
