Staff and students from a school in Devon have visited the battlefields of the Dardanelles on the third and final tour of a programme organised by the Gallipoli Centenary Education Project.
Like those before them, the teenagers from West Buckland School met Turkish counterparts from Çanakkale to exchange views on the 1915 campaign.
As one student put it: “It was really good to get a viewpoint from people our age in Turkey – a good way to understand.”
Before their visit, each student researched the story of an individual soldier who left Devon for Gallipoli in 1915 and prepared a eulogy to read out at the man’s grave.
Returning home to the UK, the group worked on a film of their research for presentation at North Devon Museum in Barnstaple alongside the work of five other schools.
Robin Clutterbuck, National Coordinator of the Gallipoli Centenary Education Project, said: ‘Gallipoli is often overlooked in Britain, where our image of the First World War is of men struggling in mud-filled trenches in Northern Europe.
“Yet the Gallipoli campaign had a massive influence on world history in the decades that followed, and teachers in our project are focussing on global citizenship as well as history. In one teacher’s words: we study it because it helps us discover what made the Great War into a World War.”
Read the full story here.
Source: Gallipoli Centenary Education Project
Images courtesy of Robin Clutterbuck
Posted by: Peter Alhadeff