I Bet you Did Not Know | 18

I Bet you Did Not Know that the new proxy owner of TGRT televison station of Turkey has a unique family link to Gallipoli.

Mavi Boncuk |

Gallipoli (1) is a 1981 film, directed by Peter Weir and starring Mel Gibson, about several young men from rural Western Australia who enlist in the Australian Imperial Force during the First World War. They are sent to Turkey, where they take part in the Battle of Gallipoli. During the course of the movie, the young men slowly lose their innocence about the nature of war. The climax of the movie occurs on the Anzac battlefield at Gallipoli and depicts the ill-fated attack at the Nek on the morning of the 7 August, 1915 by the 3rd Light Horse Brigade.

Gallipoli was mainly filmed in South Australia with some location work done at the Pyramids of Giza near Cairo which is where the AIF trained. Locations include Lake Torrens, a dry salt lake, Yallunda Flat, a scenic country sporting venue, and the coastline near Port Lincoln, which is used for the scenes at Anzac Cove.

The film was produced by R&R Films, a production company owned by Robert Stigwood and media proprietor Rupert Murdoch whose father, Keith Murdoch, was a journalist during the First World War who had visited Gallipoli briefly in September 1915 and became an influential agitator against the conduct of the campaign by the British.

Sir Keith Arthur Murdoch (August 12, 1886 - October 4, 1952) was an Australian journalist and the father of Rupert Murdoch.

Murdoch was born in Melbourne in 1886 and was educated at Camberwell Grammar School and the London School of Economics. After graduation, he began a career in journalism with The Age. He married Elisabeth Greene, now Dame Elisabeth Murdoch in 1928 and they had three daughters and a son.

Murdoch applied to become Australia's official war historian upon the outbreak of World War I in August 1914. In the ballot to decide on that position he lost out to Charles Bean.

In August 1915 that Murdoch managed to get permission to visit Anzac Cove, and for the purpose of investigating the alleged mismanagement of mail sent to Australian soldiers serving in the Gallipoli campaign. Murdoch agreed to hand deliver a letter detailing the mismanagement of the campaign from the British reporter Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett to the British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith.

On route to London, Murdoch was arrested by French Military Police in Marseille and the letter was confiscated. Murdoch made it to London but without the letter so he wrote a replacement to the Australian Prime Minister Andrew Fisher in a similar vein to the Ashmead-Bartlett letter.

It is commonly believed that the letter and the fuss that it created helped bring an end to the Gallipoli campaign.

(1) Due to the popularity of the Gallipoli battlefields as a tourist destination, the film is shown each night in a number of hostels and hotels in Eceabat and Çanakkale on the Dardanelles.