When 61-year-old Australian Anzac medical doctor Charles Snodgrass Ryan climbed out of the trenches in Gallipoli on 24 May 1915, a day of truce on the battlefield, he was wearing Ottoman Turk medals.
In seeing an enemy combatant wearing the medals of their own side, the Turkish soldiers were angry. They thought he had stolen the medals from their fallen comrades, yet when challenged, he told them in broken Turkish he himself had been awarded the medals by the Ottoman Army some 40 years prior when he served as an Ottoman military medic.
The Turkish soldiers then embraced him as a hero. It may have been the first friendly exchange between ANZAC and Turkish soldiers at the fiercely contested and bloody battlefield of Gallipoli.
Dr Ryan had also disturbed the ANZAC top brass the night before the Gallipoli landing. On that occasion, he wore his Turkish medals to a dinner held by General William Bridges on board a ship filled with high-ranking allied commanders.
In 1967 Dr Ryan’s son-in-law and Australian Governor-General R. G. Casey told the story of what happened at dinner that night to Baha Vefa Karatay the first Turkish Ambassador to Australia. The story was later published in his book:
Officers were astounded to see the commander of the Divisional Medical Corps, Charles Ryan, wearing Ottoman medals on his chest. To those who asked its meaning or questioned the appropriateness of the wearing medals of a country with which we would be in a state of actual war very soon, he replied in a very calm and resolute tone: “I earned these medals during the famous defence of Plevna, fighting under Osman Pasha’s orders and shoulder to shoulder with the gallant Turkish soldiers. If, after an interval of almost forty years, I am now going to fight with them, it is not because of a feeling of enmity against the Turks, with whom I have always been proud to have been comrades in arms at Plevna, but to carry out the orders I have received as a soldier.
Dr Ryan served with Gazi Osman Pasha, an Ottoman hero, at the Battles of Plevna in 1877 and later at the siege of Erzurum, a town in eastern Turkey.
Turkish Government officials found Dr Ryan’s grave in a Melbourne cemetery in 2015 and have recently received permission from his family to restore it. Dr Charles Ryan’s great-granddaughter, artist Siobhan Ryan, will design the new headstone.
Siobhan Ryan tells SBS Turkish her father Patrick Ryan was a good storyteller. She heard many stories of Charlie Ryan from him, such as the time in 1880 that he pulled bullets from Ned Kelly after the Kelly gang's last stand at Glen Rowan when Ned “cried like a baby”.
Siobhan Ryan standing at Charles Ryan's grave Source: SBS Turkish
Later, Dr Ryan was the doctor who pronounced Ned Kelly dead following his execution. Siobhan Ryan says she remembers Kelly’s armour being in their family home. She says it was given to Charles Ryan as a "thank you".
Now Turkey will restore Dr Ryan’s grave in the Melbourne General Cemetery in Carlton North.
“He fought for us, he fought against us and he became a hero for all of us,” says the Turkish Ambassador to Australia Korhan Karakoc.
Dr Charles Ryan was born in Longwood, Victoria in 1853. He studied medicine at Melbourne University and completed his training at the then world-leading Edinburgh University medical school. There he answered an advertisement in the London Times for a military surgeon in the Ottoman Army.
He travelled to Istanbul in 1876 and by the following year, he was in the middle of the Ottoman–Russian war. At Plevna Dr Ryan treated hundreds of Turkish soldiers in makeshift field hospitals under very primitive conditions with limited medical supplies and little nursing support.
He witnessed the horrors of war. A Bristol newspaper reported in 1890 that a shipment of 30 tones of human bones (about 30,000 skeletons) had arrived at Bristol from Plevna and was being ground into fertilizer.
Before the fall of Plevna Dr Ryan escorted wounded soldiers 300 miles to Sofia and was later sent to Erzurum in the Caucusasus in the depths of winter. Some 40 per cent of the 100,000 strong Russian army surrounding the town died of cold and disease and a similar proportion of the Ottoman garrison also perished.
Dr Ryan wrote about his experience in his book Under the Red Crescent, which was published in 1897.
After the war, he returned to Melbourne and ran a private practice as a surgeon. He also acted as an honorary Turkish Consul. He worked at the Melbourne Hospital and Children’s Hospital.
Charles Ryan's books in English and Turkish Source: Supplied
He fought for us, he fought against us and he became a hero for all of us.
In his presentation to the Royal Historical Society of Queensland in 1990, Dr Barry Smithurst told his audience Dr Ryan was dubbed 'Plevna Ryan' when he returned to Australia:
It is probably here (in Plevna), carrying out the mass amputations, which were a feature of continental surgery in the 19th Century, that he developed his snappy surgical skill. He was obviously a very fast surgeon he had learned to operate quickly under atrocious conditions during the 1877 war... (he was) prepared to do a speedy amputation, Secundum Artem, ready to relieve a strangulated hernia with a pocket knife and a piece of string. There was no doubt that his experiences as a military surgeon... may have engendered a perhaps not too careful technique... Many tales were told later of his severity, some of them probably true...
When World War One broke out Ryan was appointed Consulting Surgeon to the Australian Army and traveled to Gallipoli.
During the WW1 Centenary commemorations of 2014, Dr Ryan's story was brought to the attention of Mehmet Kucuksakalli, Turkish Consulate in Melbourne, by the New Zealand Consulate in Melbourne.
“I did some detective work even paid a small amount of money to find Ryan’s grave and family,” Mr Kucuksakalli tells SBS Turkish.
Turkish historian Haluk Oral tells SBS Turkish that Dr Ryan became known in Turkey in the 1940s after his son-in-law, Richard Gavin Gardiner Casey, was interviewed by well-known journalist Ahmet Emin Yalman.
Mr Oral found Ryan in Yalman’s memoirs and read a Turkish translation of Ryan's book Under the Red Crescent. He wrote a chapter about Ryan in his book, Gallipoli 1915, Through Turkish Eyes.
“My Australian friends who read my book say they didn’t know anything about Charles Ryan until they read the Charles Ryan chapter in my book,” he says.
Mr Oral believes a Turkish hospital should be named after Charles Ryan, and also tells SBS Turkish he found a letter from Dr Ryan to Ataturk, the founder of the modern state of Turkey, in the Turkish Foreign Ministry archives. In the letter, Dr Ryan congratulates Ataturk and asks for a signed photo.
Siobhan Ryan says she wonders if she got her blue eyes from her grandfather.
Siobhan Ryan with her grandfather's photo Source: SBS Turkish
Dr Ryan’s remarkable adventures have even attracted attention from filmmakers. Siobhan recently had lunch with people who worked on Mad Max: Fury Road.
“They said Charles’ adventures made the Mad Max films pale in comparison,” she says.
The story was first published on 23 April 2019 by SBS Turkish.
