Author(s): Walter Edmund Leadley

First World War

In the late 1990s Bill Leadley's granddaughter, Jan Chamberlin, spent many months researching her family archives in order to be able to put her grandfather's diary covering the ANZAC landing on Gallipoli in context. Shrapnel & Semaphore is the result and it is an amazing story of courage, faith and service based on a series of diary entries written by Lance-Corporal Walter Edmund (Bill) Leadley covering the period 25 April 1915 through to 8 December, and from 25 March 1916 to 9 September prior to serving at The Somme where he was seriously wounded and invalided out. The fascinating and frequently harrowing narrative is supported by family and archive photographs.