ANZAC's to establish Surf Life Saving movement in Gallipoli

A Wellington Surf Life Saving Club has been selected as part of a momentous ANZAC project to establish a Surf Life Saving movement in Turkey. The Lyall Bay Surf Life Saving Club will join three Australian Surf Life Saving Clubs to travel to Turkey in August this year. Their aim this time is to introduce Surf Life Saving to Turkey and to train young Turkish men and women for their future roles as Surf Lifeguards.

On the morning of 25 April 1915, Turkish Soldiers determined to protect their motherland, watched boatloads of ANZAC soldiers approach the Gallipoli beaches. What was to follow was bloody, horrific, and the stuff of legend. Remarkably it forged a brotherhood between the nations of New Zealand, Australia and Turkey.

Now the grandchildren of those soldiers are returning to Gallipoli to further enhance the spirit of friendship that exists between the ANZACs and the Turkish people.

Surf Life Saving Tour – August 2010

Lyall Bay Surf Life Saving Club will send a team of twelve Surf Lifeguards to participate alongside three Australian clubs and will provide two demonstration Surf Life Saving carnivals in Turkey in August this year.

The team is: Martin Robinson (Manager), Dylan McKee, Arie Moore, Brad Lawson, Alex Weir, Ray Stoddart, Nicole Taylor, Leza Papps, Amy McMullan, Mike O’Connor, Kelsey Moffatt and Chantelle Cowlrick.

“This is an incredible opportunity for Lyall Bay. The ability to travel to Gallipoli, a place so close to the hearts of everyone, and give something back to the Turkish people is an opportunity no to be missed,” said Arie Moore Lyall Bay Surf Life Saving Club Captain.

The team will participate in a lifesaving carnival on BURC Beach on the Black Sea and the other on the Aegean Sea near ANZAC cove, as well as the annual swim race across the Dardanelles, a 4 km swim from the Europe side of the Dardanelles to the Asia side. The team is expected to train local volunteers in the use of surf boats, skis, boards, and basic lifesaving skills and also host local schools instructing school children in water safety.

The intention is to provide an impetus for the establishment of surf lifesaving clubs in Turkey, with the surf boats, and other surf lifesaving gear shipped over being gifted to the Turkish community at the end of the tour.

Additionally the teams will attend the first ever surf club service at the site of an early surf club member who is buried at Gallipoli, and a service with a surf boat depicting the landing of the long boats coming ashore to Gallipoli 95 years ago.

The trip is a lead up to the Gallipoli 100 event in 2015. The 100th anniversary of the ANZAC’s landing at Gallipoli will be commemorated by a special event dubbed The Gallipoli 100 - a 100 kilometre surf boat race featuring 100 surf boats manned by Australian, New Zealand (and potentially Turkish) Surf Life Guards. The surf boats are very similar to the long boats that carried the original soldiers back in 1915.

“One hundred years, 100 surf boats and 100 kilometres - the race has massive significance, especially to Lyall Bay with our centenary celebrations looming this year.” – Arie Moore, Club Captain.

Each surfboat will contain returned servicemen and their representatives from Australia and New Zealand who will land on the beach to shake hands with representatives of Turkish returned servicemen.

Lyall Bay Surf and Life Saving Club

This is an exciting opportunity for Lyall Bay Surf Life Saving Club - it is also very appropriate being the first surf lifesaving club to patrol in New Zealand and celebrating its own centenary in 2010.

ANZAC soldier Sir Bernard Freyberg, Victoria Cross recipient, was a founding member of Lyall Bay Surf Lifesaving Club. In April 1915, Freyberg, as part of the Gallipoli landing force volunteered to swim across the Dardanelles and let off flares to divert the Turks' attention from the main landing. Despite coming under heavy Turkish fire, he returned safely from this outing, and for his action he received the Distinguished Service Order.

“What makes this even more meaningful for Lyall Bay is that Sir Freyberg was one of our founding member’s and on the inaugural committee of the Club. The fact this opportunity occurs within a week of our Centenary and Lyall Bay’s first committee meeting makes this trip even more significant to our Club.” – Arie Moore, Club Captain.

www.lyallbayslsc.org.nz

Editor’s Notes:

Sir Bernard Freyberg

The Club’s most distinguished member was Bernard Freyberg. Born in London in 1889, Freyberg accompanied his parents to Wellington in 1891. The Wellington College pupil never excelled academically, but excelled at swimming and other water sports. Water was his natural environment. ‘Rather clumsy and awkward on land’, ‘Tiny’ (as the big man was nicknamed), needed only a few metres of water to become ‘immediately transformed into a body of grace and vital activity and flowing movement.’

Between 1900 and 1911, Tiny won 14 gold and 9 silver medals in swimming competitions, mostly from the New Zealand Amateur Swimming Association championships, although he also did well at the Australian swimming champs in 1905. He was the New Zealand 100 yards champion in 1906 and 1910. The family lived in Mount Victoria, so he frequented the Te Aro baths. He was also a key member of the winning water polo team from Swift’s Swimming Club and in January 1911 became a committee member of the Lyall Bay Surf and Surf-lifesaving Club. But by now he had to earn a living, as a dental trainee, a career choice he tried to expunge from his memory for the rest of his life. A few months later, Tiny left Wellington and the Club to become an assistant to a dentist in Morrinsville.

He was not a success and after a stint as a strike-breaker during the 1913 waterfront dispute, Freyberg travelled overseas, serving as a mercenary in the Mexican Revolution (another thing he never mentioned). When World War I broke out, he joined the Royal Navy’s Hood battalion. Early in the Gallipoli campaign, he earned a DSO for his most famous swim, an epic swim to the Turkish shore at Bulair, where he lit a diversionary fire. In two world wars he would earn a VC and four DSOs and be wounded many times.

Freyberg stayed with the army after the war and had an exemplary career, becoming a major-general in 1934 aged only 45. A heart murmur brought a temporary end to his rise, but after the outbreak of World War II, he returned to the army and New Zealand Prime Minister Peter Fraser gave him command of the country’s main fighting force, the 2nd New Zealand Division, which he led with distinction during the Crete, North African and Italian campaigns. He was knighted in 1946. Freyberg was governor-general of New Zealand from 1946 to 1952. Raised to the peerage in 1951 as Baron Freyberg of Wellington, New Zealand and of Munstead in the County of Surrey, in retirement Freyberg served as deputy constable and lieutenant governor of Windsor Castle from 1953 until his death there (from the rupture of an old Gallipoli wound) in 1963.

Freyberg’s connections with Wellington swimming are commemorated by the Freyberg Pool at Oriental Bay, and by Freyberg Street in Lyall Bay, not far from his old club’s clubhouse.