Letter from John Simpson Kirkpatrick

John Simpson Kirkpatrick, a stretcher-bearer whose brief life ended early in the Gallipoli campaign, is better known today as “the man with the donkey”. Born on 6 July 1892 at Shields in County Durham, he joined the merchant marine when he was 17 and began a life of wandering that eventually led him to Australia.
Simpson joined the AIF believing he would be sent home to England, and was disappointed when the first convoy of Australians bound for war was diverted to Egypt for training. As he wrote in a letter to his family:
It is Christmas day today. I was looking forward to spending today in Shields but I was doomed to be disappointed. I would not have joined this contingent if I had known that they were not going to England. I would have taken the trip home and had a holiday at home then joined the army at home and went to the front.
Having been posted to the 3rd Field Ambulance, Simpson was among those who landed on Gallipoli on 25 April 1915. Though a stretcher-bearer, he decided his task could be better accomplished using a donkey to carry the wounded. Just three weeks after the landing, Simpson was killed by a Turkish bullet during one of his morning journeys up the feature known as Monash Valley to retrieve wounded men.
Simpson’s original correspondence with his family forms a treasured part of the Memorial’s collection. It contains interesting observations on Australia and its people, as well as some accounts of the mood of the nation as war broke out. Simpson had a very close relationship with his mother, Sarah Simpson, and sister, Annie, and the letters and postcards he received from them have also survived. This is unusual, since soldiers were generally unable to keep and store letters from home.