2nd Lieutenant, 6th Battalion Manchester Regiment.
Killed in action on Friday 4th June 1915, age 21.
Remembered on the Helles Memorial, Turkey.
Former student of medicine.
Born in 1894, Alan was the son of Sir Archibald Donald, M.D, and Lady Maude Donald of Victoria Park, Manchester. He was a pupil at Winchester School where he was a noted sportsman playing football for both Winchester and later Oxford. He went on to study medicine at New College, Oxford in 1912 where he became a member of Masonic Lodge 357. However during his summer break from his course he attended Manchester University in order to carry out practical work on anatomy and was studying at Manchester when War broke out.
Donald applied for a commission in the Manchester Regiment the day after War was declared and having served in the Officer Training Corp at Oxford was accepted as a 2nd Lieutenant into the 1/6th Territorial Battalion. He joined the Regiment at Littleborough near Rochdale and left with the Battalion for Egypt in early September 1914. As part of the 42nd East Lancashire Division the 1/6th Manchester’s landed at Gallipoli in early May 1915, and on June 4th the battalion took part in the Battle of Krithia, where they suffered some of the heaviest casualties in the division. Alan was killed during the battle leading his platoon in an attack on the Turkish Trenches, he was 21 years old. He was buried where he fell, but the grave site was later lost.