Remembrance Day 2025: Remembering Vivian Brooke - Hobart bank clerk, Gallipoli soldier

Gallipoli. 

It is the name embedded deep in the Australian psyche. The place that gave birth to the ANZAC Legend. The iconic wartime campaign that shaped the federation and embodied our sense of nationhood.

But when CBA clerk Vivian Brooke hit the beaches on the Gallipoli Peninsula at 4.30am on 25 April 1915 in the first wave of Australian troops ashore, his only thoughts were of reaching his unit’s objective in White Gully, south of Anzac Cove, alive and unscathed.

Faced with withering fire and a counter-attack from the Turkish defenders Brooke and the other 19 men of his platoon, part of the 12^th Battalion of the Australian Imperial Force, were ordered to retreat.

However, in what is now recognised as the personification of bravery and courage forged in the heat of battle at the first-time of asking, Brooke refused to do so and continued fighting until he was wounded and subsequently captured.

A prisoner of war, he was taken to the coastal town of Maidos, now Eceabat, where he was treated for his wounds in a hospital with other incarcerated allied troops.

But in one of the countless tragedies of war, the hospital was destroyed during a British Royal Naval bombardment of the town, killing many of Brooke’s wounded colleagues while he himself was further injured.

Having survived that ordeal, he was transferred with other Australian POWs to the town of Bigha but gravely injured he died of his wounds in early May – little more than two weeks after the Gallipoli landings. He was just 27.

Thousands served

Vivian Brooke was one of nearly 417,000 Australians who enlisted in the armed forces in WW1, representing at the time almost 39 per cent of the male population between the ages of 18 and 44.

He was also among the 241 staffers of the newly-created Commonwealth Bank - which opened its doors just two years before the outbreak of war – to join up to fight for his country. Just as significantly he was a member of the Hobart branch in Tasmania, from which 14 of its 22 male staff volunteered for duty.

Brooke had enlisted in August 1914, little more than 18 months after joining CBA as one of the bank’s first group of employees. Leaving for Egypt in November 1914, he was never to see home again.

Lance Corporal Brooke is buried at the Ari Burnu cemetery at Eceabat, overlooking the point where his battalion came ashore at Gallipoli.

Lest we forget.