THEY may be long gone but they definitely are not forgotten. On the 100th anniversary of the night the 1/5th Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders saw action in Gallipoli, a brand new play takes to the stage of Greenock's Beacon Arts Centre.

Penned by Elizabeth Cumming, the granddaughter of one of the survivors of the First World War battle, Fair Broke the Day follows the story of four men as dusk gathers on the final night of the allied withdrawal as they wait for the midnight hour.

"We have a memorial service every year but last winter the play was conceived as we thought it might be a way to raise money to put up a Dardanelles memorial in the town," explains Elizabeth, who grew up in Chicago and moved to Greenock when she was a teenager.

"We want a memorial not just to the dead but to all the men who served and the community of Greenock, Port Glasgow and Gourock that supported them.

"Doing research ahead of last year's centenary of the First World War we realised the vast impact the Dardanelles made in the community, but also the impact the community made in the Dardanelles."

Elizabeth started working on putting together the original muster role and says she was amazed it had never been done before. Considering the vast undertaking of the town at the time it had been all but forgotten as the years rolled by.

The men in the territorial battalion served on all three fronts: Gallipoli, Sinai and the Western Front and were led by a local, Colonel Duncan Darroch, a regular from Gourock.

"It seemed to me that the 1000 men who left the area to fight should be noted somewhere. I went to the Watt Library and discovered Betty Hendry, who works there, was another descendant of the 1/5th," says Elizabeth.

"It took us three years to get the names together, along with with the addresses of next of kin. From there I started writing the history I'm still working on."

Elizabeth's grandfather Archie MacInnes went off to war as a territorial alongside his three brothers. They all came home wounded, both Archie and younger brother Angus bizarrely in the same spot in the shoulder blades after Archie went back to the Turkish trenches to get his younger brother, who had been hit.

As well as the individual soldier's tales, the back story of the local community has particularly fascinated Elizabeth.

With the help of Vince Gillen and the staff of the McLean Museum, she discovered the lengthy supply line that went from Greenock to the front line every week, raised money and organised the town to make sure crates of goods went to the men. "It was in danger of being forgotten," she says.

Elizabeth remembers being as young as six when, growing up in the US where her family moved after the First World War, she heard her grandfather and his brother talk about their memories of Gallipoli.

With the help of a team of local volunteers, many descended from members of the battalion, they have pieced together the history.

Local man David McElvie, for example, is the grandson of the stationer who gave the young soldiers notepaper to pack in their bags. Now 400 of those letters sent by young soldiers back to their homes in the west of Scotland have been discovered.

The play Fair Broke the Day, with the name taken from a line from a Patrick Shaw-Stewart poem, has been directed by Sue MacPhee and brings the events of 100 years ago startlingly back to life. Nearly 1000 men were shipped out but less than 400 survived.

"We also had the Seafield lads, who were on the SS River Clyde when she beached on the shingle in the Gallipoli landings," says Elizabeth.

"That is possibly one of the most iconic images of the campaign and that ship was built in Port Glasgow by the fathers of many of the men who were on it.

"There were also tug boats with civilian crews that left from Greenock to go to try and position the gunboats, many engineers were used as sappers and every tent that went up in the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force was made by Blacks of Greenock. When you add all that to the supply chain the town had made, it was a great sense of common purpose."

Centenary weekend events on July 11 and 12 to remember the men of the 1/5th Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders includes cemetery walks and a visit by Christopher Blake, the son of novelist George Blake, who wrote the Path of Glory, considered one of the best war novels ever written.

The wartime campaign in Turkey may be remembered across the Atlantic thanks to the efforts of Elizabeth's cousin Kimi Lizanby-Barber, who has put forward a motion in US Congress to have Gallipoli Day recognised because so many of the men who fought on the peninsula later emigrated to America.

Fair Broke the Day, Beacon Arts Centre, July 12. Visit www.beaconartscentre.co.uk