The Last Post Ceremony commemorating the service of Lieutenant Alan Serafino Righetti, 2nd Light Horse Regiment, AIF, First World War.

The Last Post Ceremony is presented in the Commemorative area of the Australian War Memorial each day. The ceremony commemorates more than 102,000 Australians who have given their lives in war and other operations and whose names are recorded on the Roll of Honour. At each ceremony the story behind one of the names on the Roll of Honour is told. Hosted by Gerard Pratt, the story for this day was on Lieutenant Alan Serafino Righetti, 2nd Light Horse Regiment, AIF, First World War.

Lieutenant Alan Serafino Righetti, 2nd Light Horse Regiment, AIF
KIA 4 August 1916
Photograph: P01098.002

Story delivered 5 August 2016

Today we remember and pay tribute to Lieutenant Alan Serafino Righetti, who was killed while fighting in Egypt during the First World War.

Alan Righetti was born in 1889 to Edward and Mary Righetti of Heywood in Victoria. He carried the name of his grandfather, Serafino, who had had emigrated from Switzerland to try his luck on the Victorian goldfields in the 1850s, after which he established the Righetti & Co. General Store and Sawmill in Heywood. Alan attended St Patrick’s College in Ballarat, where he excelled at commerce. This put him in good stead to run the family store while his father was serving in South Africa during the Boer War.

Around 1910, Alan’s family moved to Queensland, where he paraded part-time with the 3rd Light Horse Regiment at nearby Bowen. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant in A Squadron on the eve of the First World War.

Both Righetti and his father enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force in August 1914, little more than a week after war was declared. Backed by his experience in the Boer War, Edward Righetti was the second-in-command of the 5th Light Horse Regiment, while Alan was given a commission and sailed for Egypt with the 2nd Light Horse Regiment after several months training in Brisbane.

The light horse did not take part in the landings on Gallipoli; as mounted troops, they were considered to be of little use in the steep, precipitous terrain of the Anzac beach head. However, as casualties on the peninsula rose, light horse regiments were transported to Gallipoli to
fight dismounted as infantry. Righetti took part in the defence of the Anzac positions in the area around Quinn’s Post in August, until his regiment left the peninsula four months later.

Back in Egypt, the 2nd Light Horse Regiment formed part of the Anzac Mounted Division and spent the early months of 1916 defending the Suez Canal against Ottoman incursions across the Sinai Desert. While the rest of the AIF departed for the fighting on the Western Front, the Anzac Mounted Division joined British forces in a campaign that would ultimately cross the desert into Palestine, pushing the Ottomans across the River Jordan.

The division’s first action was fought at Romani on 4 August 1916, where troopers of the 2nd Light Horse Regiment withstood a fierce Ottoman assault in the area known as Wellington Ridge. After two days of fighting, the regiment had suffered 50 casualties. Among them was Lieutenant Alan Righetti, who lay among the regiment’s nine dead the following morning. Aged 27 at the time of his death, he was buried at nearby Kantara. A small epitaph on his headstone reads: “Australia mourns her gallant son.”

Alan Righetti’s name is listed on the Roll of Honour on my right, among more than 60,000 Australians who died while serving in the First World War. His photograph is displayed today beside the Pool of Reflection.

This is but one of the many stories of service and sacrifice told here at the Australian War Memorial. We now remember Lieutenant Alan Righetti, who gave his life for us, for our freedoms, and in the hope of a better world.

Aaron Pegram
Historian, Military History Section