"There were a few things I will never forget about that time. On one occasion, when we were in Gallipolli, I thought we wouldn’t get out alive. There was a downpour of rain and the trenches quickly filled up with water. We had to stand there up to our waist in mud in the cold month of November. That was one time when I thought I would not survive the war. We often went very hungry. If we managed to get a tin of corned beef we would be ecstatic. We would sometimes go searching through the trenches in the hope of finding something to eat. Initially, the bread we got was shipped over from Britain in large bags. By the time it arrived, most of it was reduced to crumbs. When we would get our rations they were so meagre that we kept them inside our bonnets - a handful of crumbs. After a while however, they started baking the bread in Egypt and things were not quite so bad then.

"We had few opportunities to wash ourselves. In the Dardenelles we happened to be near the sea and could sometimes wash there. But we were regularly sorely tried with skin irritations and the lack of proper sanitation. We seldom received a letter from home. When I was in Greece in 1916, my father died and it it took three weeks before I received the news. Everything at that time came by boat rather than plane. In the summer of 1918 the Prime Minister, Lloyd George, was trying to increase production in the munitions factories. For this purpose he started ordering back to Britain some of the servicemen who had a relevant trade. I had been a plater before the war.