Tag: Boswells Galloping Farmers

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Boswell’s Galloping Farmers Award Winning Audio Drama

SANDY BARCLAY
Award winning audio drama
WINNER

“A rich and deeply immersive audio experience.  This production combines meticulous research, powerful storytelling and exceptional sound design to bring its subjects vividly to life. Compelling, moving and unforgettable.”

Boswell’s Galloping Farmers won in the History, Folklore and Heritage category at The Scottish Podcast Awards. It was also awarded a Highly Commended in the Fiction and Drama category. JB was the sound designer for this six part audio drama based on the real life experiences of Alexander (Sandy) Barclay, who fought in the infamous Gallipoli campaign of 1915.

Originally volunteers in the Ayrshire Mounted Yeomanry Sandy and his colleagues, known as Boswell’s Galloping Farmers, had their horses taken away and were sent to Gallipoli as infantrymen to fight in the trenches against the Turkish army.

The campaign saw Sandy and Boswell’s Galloping Farmers, outnumbered, under-provisioned, and out-gunned. Surviving the horrific casualties, Sandy came home after the campaign, and sixty years later wrote the memoir of his experiences, recounted in this compelling audio drama written by Jill Korn and Martin Gallagher

“Sixty years it’s been. I can’t quite believe it myself. You live your life; you think it’s all behind you. But it’s still there, inside you, the sights, the sounds, and the smells of it all. Aye. The smells. I’ve read a lot about it, the Gallipoli campaign, —  but I’ve never found anything that tells the story of what it was like for the ordinary ranker, the man behind the rifle and the grenade and what those of us that came out of it alive, lived through.”

LISTEN TO THE DRAMA ON SPOTIFY NOW:

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Audio drama in production.

RMSP Arcadian

The story of Boswell’s Galloping Farmers tells how a volunteer regiment of mounted yeomanry from the Ayrshire farming community were retrained as grenadier infantry and sent to fight The Turks in Gallipoli.

Jill Korn and I are working on an ambitious adaptation of a memoir written by Sandy Barclay in 1975. Sandy was there and he captures the struggles, horrors and, yes, humour of daily life in the trenches during the last three months of 1915.

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Jill is writing the script with Martin Gallagher. I’m dealing with the audio and post production, and we hope to publish four episodes of the audio drama early in 2025.
It’s astounding to see the number of people it can take some others to produce an audio drama, and what that must cost. We’re doing it for the love of it.

I enjoy little better than Field Recording; collecting sounds for my effects from real life. Recently on a weekend away I took the chance to record the sounds of a 1900s steam ship to repurpose as RMSP Arcadian, the troop ship that took sandy and his mates through the Med to Gallipoli.

We need the help of actors, singers and musicians to bring the story alive, and we want to pay them for their work. Please click the image or this link to Jill’s Crowdfunder page, for more details and to make a donation towards helping those people feed their families. All of the money raised will go to the creative people who bring their skills to this project.

The featured image is licensed for use under Creative Commons CC0 License; text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.