GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN

PRIVATE ROBERT MORRIS

NEWFOUNDLAND REGIMENT

8TH JANUARY 1916 AGE 28

BURIED: LANCASHIRE LANDING CEMETERY, TURKEY


Robert Morris was the last Newfoundland soldier to be killed on Gallipoli and very nearly the last Allied soldier to die on the peninsular. The War Graves Commission gives his date of death as 7 January but Anthony Stacey, in recalling the circumstances of Morris's death in his memoirs, 'Memoirs of a Blue Puttee' says it was on the 8th. It was just hours before the final Allied withdrawal and Morris was sitting with a group of fellow Newfoundlanders eating their last meal when a shell burst among them wounding several soldiers and killing Private Robert Morris. He was buried immediately and by dawn the next morning there were none but the most severely wounded left on the peninsular. These were looked after by a skeleton medical staff and the chief medical officer who hoped to negotiate with the Turks for permission to allow a Red Cross ship to take them off the next day.
Robert Morris's inscription - Gone but not forgotten - is one of the most popular of all personal inscriptions in both civilian and military cemeteries.