Our family’s greatest hero is my great, great uncle, James Parkinson.

He hailed from a large dynasty of Morecambe Bay fisher folk, though he himself trained as a stonemason.

Mysteriously, however, when he was 20 in 1890, he disappeared from his home at Conder Green on the Lune estuary and was never heard of again until, 25 years later, when he was wounded out of the First World War.

Famously, many brave youths added years to their age in order to fight in that war. But Uncle Jim did the reverse.

While living in Sheffield he joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve when he was 45, having claimed to be ten years younger.

Soon he was in action at Gallipoli, where the allies were attempting, disastrously, to wrest the Dardanelles straits from the Turks.

Here, Uncle Jim became possibly the oldest winner of the Conspicuous Gallantry Medal, which is the next highest military decoration to the Victoria Cross.

He was in the thick of the campaign’s most sanguinary episode at Suvla Bay on April 25 which, because of the huge casualties suffered by Australian and New Zealand forces is still commemorated as ANZAC Day.

Having ‘gone in’ on SS ‘River Clyde’ he went out to rescue wounded troops mown down in the waves by enemy fire.

For the same actions his officer, Lieutenant Tisdall, earned a posthumous Victoria Cross.

The citation recording this officer’s valour refers to Leading Seaman Parkinson ‘who having had a bullet pass through his cap became desperate and continued pulling men aboard a badly leaking lifeboat where one man drowned in the blood and water at the bottom’. Parkinson commented “We carried on though we should probably be dead men ... we had no alternative”. Continuing to serve after the landings he suffered shrapnel wounds and was sent home.’

Eventually, in 1916, he turned up at the house in Lancaster of his nephew James Parkinson Rushton, who was my grandfather. He came for the night but stayed until his death in 1936, having eked out his war service pension by driving a corporation tram car.

Though ‘they tried him drunk and sober he never let on about what he’d been up to before the war’, but he did regale everyone with hellish tales of Gallipoli.

Consequently, to the sardonic amusement of his family, his last word seemed appropriate. Someone asked him “did that fellow get that job?” to which Uncle Jim replied “No. Did he hell” whereupon, he dropped down dead.

Even so, I hope a place was found in heaven for our family’s hero.