Tynemouth WW1 Commemoration Project

Sad demise of the Collingwood Battalions in Belgium and Dardanelles fighting

The Naval Brigades were formed in August, 1914 by Winston Churchill (First Lord of the Admiralty. Faced with a surplus of naval reservists both former seamen and RNVR volunteers he decided that a body of men trained to fight on land would be the best use of these willing or committed men - in the absence of any requirement for additional crews.

Two battalions of Royal Marines and six battalions of reservists were formed into two Naval Brigades and transferred to Crystal Palace in London for training and equipping.

The battalions were given names with strong naval associations and maintained naval rank structures but were led by seconded Army commanders. Not held in very high regard by the army, they were first employed on Churchill’s orders in a last ditch effort to reinforce the Belgian army in front of Antwerp, to prevent its falling in to enemy hands. That action was short lived and the only option when Belgian resistance failed was to retreat back towards the North Sea coast. Unfortunately, whether by accident or deliberately (to avoid becoming prisoners of war), the bulk of the Collingwood Battalion –all but 22 men – either crossed over the Dutch border and were interned as aliens for the rest of the war or fell prisoners to the advancing German army.

Withdrawn back to Britain the remnant of Collingwood was augmented back to battalion strength and embodied as part of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force sent east to exploit a hoped for naval forcing of the Dardanelles straits. An attempt in March, 1915, to force the straits by sea and capture the coast on either side up to Istanbul and the Bosporus, thus knocking Turkey out of the war, failed.

Those members of the War Cabinet intent on a perceived alternative to the now obvious deadlock on the Western front in France and Belgium determined to press on and appointed Sir Ian Hamilton to head a land invasion of the Gallipoli peninsular. After bloody landings on the west side of the barren and rocky neck of the Dardanelles, on 25^th April, 1915, the allies found themselves fighting against well-positioned and courageous defenders. All attempts to advance up the peninsular towards the town of Gallipoli foundered. One such attack, on the 4^th June, led to the almost total annihilation of the officers and many men of the Collingwood Battalion. Badly mauled, the battalion was withdrawn and disbanded - its survivors allocated to other battalions.

Among those killed that day were several men from Tynemouth and a man from South Shields, Wallace Moir Annand, a former student of Armstrong College, Newcastle – then a part of Durham University. Annand had a son Richard born on 4^th November, 1914 who would follow in his father’s footsteps and earn the first VC awarded to a member of the army in the Second World War.

One can only speculate whether if the Nelson battalion had been similarly damaged to the Collingwood it’s illustrious name would have been allowed to disappear from the ranks of the Naval Division.

Alan Fidler