John Simpson Kirkpatrick, Digger or Geordie? The untold story of his family

There are three places in the world where Private John Simpson Kirkpatrick, (also known simply as Jack Simpson) is immortalised in bronze. One statue is in South Shields, England, and the others are outside the Australian War Memorial in Canberra and the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne. Simpson’s extraordinary bravery at Gallipoli in 1915 has passed into legend and most Australian children learn his story in their history lessons.
 
A considerable number of books, articles and even plays have featured Jack and with each outing it seems his myth grows even greater, so this recent publication by Kelso McEwan Yuill makes for some refreshing and enlightening reading. The author has taken a different approach and rather than producing another hagiography has gone in search of Jack’s family: who they were and how their genes and the environment in which he was raised combined together to create this brave young stretcher-bearer who, according to Colonel [later Sir] John Monash, his Australian commanding officer at Gallipoli, “knew no fear and moved unconcernedly through shrapnel and rifle fire” in his determination to carry wounded men to safety on the back of a donkey.
 
Some of the fantasies perpetuated in previous accounts are overturned, just one example being the accident which supposedly crippled Jack’s father in 1904 when in fact Robert Kirkpatrick continued to work and did not die until 1909. The story of Sarah Simpson (Jack’s mother) who lived for a time in luxury in Malaga appears here for the first time, and there are further revelations of family feuding, adultery, illegitimacy and mental breakdown, all of which might combine into a saga worthy of anything that other Tyneside legend, the author Catherine Cookson, could have devised.
 
Jack had healthy self-belief and was not backward in offering his opinions - some of which may be considered a touch racist and sexist by today’s standards - about all that was wrong with “louse bound England” or what the womenfolk in his family needed to be doing in his absence. Nor was he above a bit of swagger and exaggeration or deliberate obfuscation when it might suit him. His comments are not edited out of the extracts from his letters as has been the case in some previous biographies. If you have not read about Simpson before you will gain a good sense of what he was really like; fearless and cheerful in spite of the odds but, above all, a young man with a firm conscience about doing what was right.
 
The book is exceptionally detailed, with many photographs. Interspersed within the chapters are paragraphs describing what was happening politically or socially at the time and these help to set the family’s situation in context. Several chapters are devoted to the ups and downs in the career (and love life) of Jack’s sea-going father, Robert Kirkpatrick; a man often forced to take jobs well below his qualifications in order to keep his growing second family off the bread line. This part of the book will be fascinating for anyone interested in what the life of a Scottish seaman was like around the end of the 19th Century. The Appendices also provide family trees and much additional detail about Jack’s extended family, many of whom were also seafarers.
 
Some typographical and editing errors have slipped through in the text, especially in regard to apostrophes, but these are minor issues compared to the extensive research and scale of the information it contains. Not just on Jack Simpson, but in the way people lived at a time when life could be brutal, family tragedies were almost commonplace and there was no social welfare to prop you up financially.

Recommended not just for its new information on the legendary “Man with the Donkey”, but for anyone researching family history in general before and after World War I and it would also be a valuable addition to any historical or genealogical library.
 
With much appreciation to the author for sending me a copy.
 
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