BURY’S Fusilier Museum is to play an important role in a project to help schools across Europe unlock the secrets of one of World War One’s bloodiest campaigns.

A lottery grant of £100,000 to the Gallipoli Association means pupils will study the Gallipoli campaign in the build up to its centenary next year.

The organisation works to keep alive the memory of the campaign, as well as encouraging research and education on the subject.

The Gallipoli Association, and some members, will contribute £35,000 to the project.

The Fusilier Museum in Bury and the Touchstones Museum in Rochdale will work on the project.

In 1915 more than 500,000 Allied troops, including 410,000 British soldiers, fought in the campaign to capture a peninsula guarding the Dardanelles Straits in modern-day Turkey.

The fighting cost 58,000 Allied lives, with another 196,000 wounded or sick and at least as many victims among the Turks.

The Lancashire Fusiliers, famously won “six VCs before breakfast” when storming the beaches at Gallipoli.

The venture failed and while much has been written on the subject, more remains to be discovered, especially about the lives of the ordinary soldiers on both sides.

It is these personal stories that the Gallipoli Centenary Education Project will seek to tell.

The project will involve schools and youngsters from all the combatant countries.

Children will research the roles of soldiers from their area, with the help of museums and regimental archive services.

Teachers, artists, film-makers and actors will help develop and interpret stories which will then be shared on a dedicated website.

Lyn Edmonds, of the Gallipoli Association, said: “This is a landmark opportunity to involve young people in education about the Great War and what it still means today.

"We hope that schools can forge relationships with the regiments whose heritage they are exploring and can set their studies in the context of modern conflict.”