The AIF Project

Frederick Christian William BALLERUM

Regimental number6837
Place of birthSydney New South Wales
ReligionChurch of England
OccupationEngineer
AddressAbingdon Bay Road, North Sydney, New South Wales
Marital statusMarried
Age at embarkation34
Next of kinWife, Mrs E Ballerum 12 Paul Street, East Balmain, Sydney, New South Wales
Previous military serviceServed in the Australian Naval & Military Expeditionary Force, German New Guinea, 1914.
Enlistment date25 January 1916
Date of enlistment from Nominal Roll25 January 1916
Rank on enlistmentPrivate
Unit name8th Battalion, 22nd Reinforcement
AWM Embarkation Roll number23/25/5
Embarkation detailsUnit embarked from Sydney, New South Wales, on board HMAT SS Port Napier on 17 November 1916
Rank from Nominal RollPrivate
Unit from Nominal Roll8th Battalion
Other details from Roll of Honour CircularEnlisted 25 January 1916. Taken on strength, 8th Bn, 16 May 1917.
FateKilled in Action 4 October 1917
Place of death or woundingBroodseinde, Passchendaele, Belgium
Date of death4 October 1917
Age at death35
Place of burialNo known grave
Commemoration detailsThe Ypres (Menin Gate) Memorial (Panel 7), Belgium

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.

Panel number, Roll of Honour,
  Australian War Memorial
52
Other details

War service: enlisted in the Australian Naval & Military Expeditionary Force, F Company, 11 August 1914, as Private, No. 695; embarked from Sydney on board HMAT A35 'Berrima', 19 August 1914. Returned to Australia; enlisted in the AIF, 11 August 1916.

War service: Western Front

Medals: 1914-15 Star, British War Medal, Victory Medal

Print format    


© The AIF Project 2024, UNSW Canberra. Not to be reproduced without permission.