The Last Post Ceremony commemorating the service of (512) Private Allan St Clair Galvin, 3rd Australian Infantry Battalion, 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 Sharon Bown, the story for this day was on (512) Private Allan St Clair Galvin, 3rd Australian Infantry Battalion, AIF, First World War.

512 Private Allan St Clair Galvin, 3rd Australian Infantry Battalion, AIF
KIA 6 August 1915

Today we remember and pay tribute to Private Allan St Clair Galvin.

Allan Galvin was born in Tarcutta, New South Wales, in April 1895, the eldest son of Thomas and Adelaide Galvin.

Galvin attended a local primary school and then Wagga Wagga secondary school, where he joined the army cadets. He was one of three cadets from the school selected to represent New South Wales in England at the coronation of King George the Fifth in 1911. After leaving school, Galvin became a school teacher in Tarcutta.
In August 1914, Galvin was among the first to enlist in the Australian Imperial Force. He joined the 3rd Australian Infantry Battalion and completed his initial training in Sydney. In October 1914, he embarked for Egypt on the transport ship Euripides, part of the first convoy carrying Australian troops for service.

The 3rd Battalion disembarked in Egypt in early December. The men trained at the camps in the desert into the new year, when British commanders decided upon the invasion of the Gallipoli peninsula, the Royal Navy having failed to capture the Dardanelles Strait.

The 3rd Battalion left Egypt in early April 1915, first sailing to the Greek island of Lemnos and spending most of the month continuing drills and training while on board.
At 5:30 am on 25 April, Galvin and his unit landed on Gallipoli. Ashore by 8:30, the 3rd Battalion captured a ridge and spent the rest of the day digging in. By the end of that first day, more than one man in ten of the battalion had been wounded or killed.

Galvin remained with the battalion during heavy fighting. After a major Turkish counter-attack in late May 1915, he wrote to his mother: “After four weeks’ fighting, I am still hale and hearty”. During July, he was treated for an illness, but he returned to duty on the same day.

In early August, the 3rd Battalion took part in an ill-fated attack on a series of Turkish trenches known as “Lone Pine”, named after a single large pine tree in the area. The Australians managed to capture most of their objectives, but at a very heavy cost. The 3rd Battalion’s war diary records the confusion of the attack, and concludes with the stark statement, “Our casualties are unknown but very heavy”.

During the fighting, Galvin went missing. Some of his comrades recalled seeing him hit by machine-gun fire and killed. Others remembered seeing him wounded, being carried back to the Australian lines on a stretcher.
An official court of enquiry held in June 1916, nearly a year after Galvin went missing, concluded that he had been killed in action at some point between 6 and 12 August 1915 at Lone Pine. He was 20 years old.

Galvin’s remains were never recovered, and today he is commemorated on the Lone Pine Memorial on the Gallipoli Peninsula, alongside more than 4,900 Australian and New Zealand troops who died in the area and have no known grave.

Galvin’s mother Adelaide, and his fiancée Aileen Ramsay, wrote regularly to army records to find out what had happened to him. They heard various reports from other men in the 3rd Battalion that he had been evacuated to hospital, but feared the worst because he had not written home in a long time. It was only in October 1916 that they heard the results of the court of enquiry and learned that he had died more than a year earlier.

Allan Galvin was survived in Australia by his parents and his two younger brothers, George and Frederick.
Private Allan St Clair Galvin is listed on the Roll of Honour on my right, among almost 62,000 Australians who died while serving in the First World War.

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

Thomas Rogers
Historian, Military History Section