Lance Corporal Walter Richard Parker RMLI Exactly one month after the first British troops landed in France following the out-break of the First World War, Walter Parker enlisted in the Royal Marine Light Infantry on 9 September 1914. He was already thirty-two years old, and had been working in an Ironworks.
On 28 April 1915, Walter Parker was amongst the stretcher bearers of Portsmouth Battalion Royal Marines Light Infantry (RMLI) landing at Anzac Cove in the Gallipoli campaign. Two days later he was to win the Victoria Cross, the first for Anzac beach, but the last to be announced.
At ‘Lonesome Pine Plateau’ near Gaba Tepe on 30 April 1915, Lieutenant Empson RMLI and forty or so men had become pinned down in an isolated advanced trench with a number of wounded. Lance Corporal Parker volunteered for a party on men to attempt to take them ammunition, water, and medical supplies over the four-hundred yards of open terrain. He alone managed to reach the position, and by dawn the next day assisted in carrying the wounded under fire, when the trench was evacuated. He was shot twice in the process and never fully recovered from the wounds when he was discharged in May 1916.
Lance Corporal Parker was eventually gazetted for the Victoria Cross on 22 June 1917; the delay being caused by reports not reaching Britain, and many of the witnesses subsequently being killed in the campaign. He died in 1936, and his medals were presented to the RM Museum by his daughter Mrs V C De Ville in 1970.
