Author Rachel Billington on the inspiration for her book, Glory

I was born in Oxford during the Second World War. My father, Frank Pakenham (later Lord Longford), was a don at Christ Church.

As I grew up I realised that this period, tragic for many, had an unhappy resonance for him because his was not a ‘good war’. In fact he had a breakdown brought on by his efforts to be a private in the Oxfordshire and Bucks Light Infantry.

None of this might have had huge importance – he was far more useful working on the famous Beveridge Report which provided the foundations for the welfare state.

But my father’s father had been a hero of the First World War. He was killed at Gallipoli in 1915 and my father felt he had let him down by failing at his own military challenge.

I knew little about this grandfather, Brigadier General Thomas, Earl of Longford, except for his last noble words said to his ADC, Fred Cripps as he strode to his death. “Don’t duck, Fred. It does no good and the men don’t like it.”

Family archives in Ireland informed me that Tom Longford was 49 years old when he died, had six children, aged from two to 13, and an adored wife, Mary.

He died on August 21 at Suvla Bay in one of the last attacks of the disastrous campaign that was conceived by Winston Churchill as a diversion from the stalemate of the Western Front.

I began to believe there was a novel to be written and travelled to Gallipoli.

There, historian Peter Hart led me across the dried salt lake where Tom Longford marched at the head of his brigade, and to Chocolate Hill and finally Scimitar Hill where he died, probably wounded, then burnt alive by fires started by shelling from allied ships.

I climbed over the other landing sites, Helles and Anzac.

I was aghast at the pointless horror of it all, only too well illustrated by the bullets and bones still littering the ground. I even picked up (and dropped quickly) a set of teeth.

The destination was Constantinople but after nine months the Allied troops from Britain, Ireland, France, Australia, New Zealand and India had scarcely left the cliffs and beaches. The beauty of the area, the sparkling Aegean, misty islands and long Asian shore, where the classical city of Troy beckoned, only made the brutality seem more dreadful.

When the peninsula was evacuated in January 1916, most of the bodies lay where they had fallen until 1919. Tom Longford’s body was never found. The Allied casualties were 59,000 dead and a quarter of a million wounded, all men.

But reading my grandmother Mary Longford’s diaries made me determined that my novel should have a female presence.

There were no women on Gallipoli, no place on the beaches for R and R, nor even female nurses, but wives, mothers, lovers, sisters were, of course, closely involved both in England, and as nurses on nearby islands, on Malta or in Egypt.

Glory as I called my novel, would carry the story of Gallipoli, both the heroism and the cruelty, through a group of characters, most of them young.

I would spin along from the early days of the April landings when the young officers, like my Lieutenant Arthur Lamb, were filled with patriotism and dreams of glory to the disillusionment as the war progressed, seen by Lydia Fitzpaine, Arthur’s fiancée, or Private Fred Chaffey, a country boy who volunteers for excitement and adventure. Even during the most harrowing events there is room for love.

I painted a wide canvas determined to capture the truth of the campaign and portray both villains and heroes. I also felt that my father would have recognised Brigadier General Bingo Fitzpaine, one of the few older characters, as appropriate homage to his father. The title, Glory, is inspired by the inscriptions on the Gallipoli gravestones, “Their Glory shall not be blotted out”.

* Glory by Rachel Billington is published by Orion Books – £19.99 hardback, £9.99 paperback.