The Menin Gate Memorial (so named because the road led to the town of Menin) was constructed on the site of a gateway in the eastern walls of the old Flemish town of Ypres, Belgium, where hundreds of thousands of allied troops passed on their way to the front, the Ypres salient, the site from April 1915 to the end of the war of some of the fiercest fighting of the war.

The Memorial was conceived as a monument to the 350,000 men of the British Empire who fought in the campaign. Inside the arch, on tablets of Portland stone, are inscribed the names of 56,000 men, including 6,178 Australians, who served in the Ypres campaign and who have no known grave.

The opening of the Menin Gate Memorial on 24 July 1927 so moved the Australian artist Will Longstaff that he painted 'The Menin Gate at Midnight', which portrays a ghostly army of the dead marching past the Menin Gate. The painting now hangs in the Australian War Memorial, Canberra, at the entrance of which are two medieval stone lions presented to the Memorial by the City of Ypres in 1936.

Since the 1930s, with the brief interval of the German occupation in the Second World War, the City of Ypres has conducted a ceremony at the Memorial at dusk each evening to commemorate those who died in the Ypres campaign.

War service: Egypt, Gallipoli, Western Front

Reported wounded in action, 8 August 1915 (gun shot wound, back); admitted to Lowlands Convalescent Hospital, Mudros, 11 August 1915; transferred to Base, Mudros, 27 August 1915; to England, 31 August 1915; admitted to Reading War Hospital, 17 September 1915; reported to Base Depot, Weymouth, 15 February 1916. Disembarked Alexandria from Devonport, 5 March 1916; rejoined 14th Bn, Serapeum, 2 April 1916.

Embarked Alexandria to join the British Expeditionary Force, 1 June 1916; disembarked Marseilles, 8 June 1916.

Wounded in action (2nd occasion), 11 August 1916 (gun shot wound, right groin), and admitted to 2nd field Ambulance; transferred to 9th General Hospital, Rouen, 12 August 1916; to 4th Australian General Base Depot, Etaples, 26 Auguswt 1916; rejoined unit, 11 September 1916.

Appointed Lance Corporal, 12 April 1917.

Appointed to Permanent Cadre of 4th Training Bn, England, 17 July 1917. Proceeded overseas to France, 2 October 1917; rejoined 14th Bn, 7 October 1917. Reported sick to hospital, 16 October; subsequently reported killed in action, Belgium, 16 October 1917.