BOSWELL’s GALLOPING FARMERS

“A fantastic play. You’d think you were there with them in this vivid account, through the eyes of young boys, forced to become men before their time in a grim passage of history we should never let be forgotten.”

Boswell’s Galloping Farmers is a six-part adaptation of the unpublished personal account of Alexander (“Sandy”) Barclay, a young farmer who served with the Ayrshire Yeomanry in the Gallipoli campaign of 1915. The Ayrshire Yeomanry was a cavalry regiment but the soldiers’ horses were taken from them during training in Scotland, and they were sent forward as infantry into some of the most brutal and unforgiving trench conditions of the war. By turns brutal, horrific and funny, Sandy’s memoir survived only because it was later discovered among family papers and subsequently published as part of the Ayrshire Monographs series by historians Rob Close and William W. Watson.

In partnership with fellow playwright Martin Gallagher, Jill Korn has adapted his testimony into a moving series of audio plays, with immersive sound design by John Boyd and music composed by Martin Gallagher. The drama brings Sandy’s voice back into the present day more than 110 years after the Yeomanry were deployed to the Helles Peninsula.

Speaking about the project, playwright Jill Korn said:

“What moved me most in Sandy’s writing is that you can still hear the boy inside the man who survived. He came home — but so many of his friends did not — and giving voice to his memories feels like a way of honouring those who never returned.”