Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

From 1897 to 1901 Alban Shepherd Munn attended The Lucton School. From 1902 to 1908 he attended the Ludlow Grammar School and subsequently received training in engineering at Nettlefolds in Birmingham (Nettlefolds was subsequently acquired by GK and became the well-known fastening company GKN). He emigrated to Australia at age 18 in 1910, sailing to Fremantle aboard the Otway. He was listed as a carter. He moved straight to Bridgetown after arriving and decided to be a farmer. After working on properties in the area, he purchased a block of his own at Blackwood Park. However, the war upset his plans and he enlisted on 21 September 1914 as 401 Alban Shepherd Munn, joining B Company, the 16th Battalion which had been raised on 16 September. His record shows that he stood 1.76 m tall and weighed 76 kg. During initial training at Blackboy Hill, near Perth, Alban was promoted to Corporal on 5 November, probably as a result of previous officer training in England. On 21 November, at the completion of training, the 16th Battalion embarked from Fremantle and sailed to Melbourne where they joined the other three battalions of the 4th Australian Infantry Brigade AIF under Colonel John Monash at the Broadmeadows camp to complete their organisation and training. After marching through Melbourne (above), the battalion sailed for Egypt from Port Melbourne at 2:30 pm on 22 December 1914 on the troopship A40 Ceramic.

After calling at Albany (27 December) and Aden (20 January), on 3 February 1915, the battalion disembarked at Alexandria, Egypt. They travelled by train to camp at Heliopolis and remained there, undergoing training, until early April. On 4 April, the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) received orders to hold itself in readiness to leave Egypt. The 16th Battalion left by train for Alexandria on 11 April where they boarded the troopship Hyda Pasha and on the afternoon of 25 April off the Gallipoli peninsula the battalion assembled in the ship’s hold. They were then transferred to a destroyer which took them close to shore. From the destroyer they were transferred into the ship’s boats and rowed to the shore, amidst a hail of shells.

The 16th went ashore at Gallipoli at about 6:00pm on the first day of the landing, 25 April 1915, under the command of Lt Col Harold Pope. Pope’s Hill at Gallipoli is named after him. In official histories, the landing phase of the campaign extended from 25 April to the attack on a hill called the Bloody Angle on 2 May. At nightfall on 2 May, the 16th went into attack up Dead Man’s Ridge, which was in front of Pope’s Hill and to the immediate left of Quinn’s Post. Throughout the night they continued to fight and dig trenches. The battalion’s exposure to continual firing made it very dangerous to carry ammunition to them:


“Again and again volunteers were shot as they scrambled up with heavy cases; others took their places only to fall dead across the boxes they were dragging, or to roll down the steep side of the hill.” (Captain C Longmore, The Old Sixteenth: being a record of the 16th Battalion, AIF, during the Great War 1914-1918, Perth, 1929, p 47.)

Near dawn on 3 May, the 16th rose out of their trenches to attack the Turkish position, about 100 metres away, but they were seen and met with heavy fire. Their attempt failed and when dawn came their dead ‘lay thickly on the slopes’. Corporal (acting Sergeant) Allan Shepherd Munn died during this battle on 2 May 1915. 338 of the 620 other ranks from the 16th Battalion were killed that night. Bloody Angle was overlooked by the Turkish trenches on the high ground so it was impossible to retrieve the remains of those who had fallen. As a result, Sergeant Munn was listed as Missing in Action until a Court of Inquiry held at Serapeum in Egypt in April 1916 ruled that he had been Killed in Action. By the time the remains from Bloody Angle were able to be retrieved they had been reduced to bones and all means of identification had been lost. Allan Shepherd Munn therefore has no known grave and his only record at Gallipoli is his name recorded on the memorial at Lone Pine.