The AIF Project

Edward Thomas HENDERSON

Regimental number534
Place of birthQuirindi, New South Wales
SchoolSt Bridgids Convent School
ReligionRoman Catholic
OccupationBaker
Address189 Oxford Street, Leederville, Western Australia
Marital statusSingle
Age at embarkation19
Next of kinMother, Mrs Agnes Apis, 189 Oxford Street, Leederville, Western Australia
Previous military serviceServed in the 86th Infantry, Citizen Forces, Western Australia
Enlistment date8 February 1916
Date of enlistment from Nominal Roll29 January 1916
Rank on enlistmentPrivate
Unit name44th Battalion, C Company
AWM Embarkation Roll number23/61/1
Embarkation detailsUnit embarked from Fremantle, Western Australia, on board HMAT A29 Suevic on 6 June 1916
Rank from Nominal RollPrivate
Unit from Nominal Roll28th Battalion
Other details from Roll of Honour CircularWas a footballer, runner and cricketer
FateKilled in Action 31 October 1917
Place of death or woundingYpres, Belgium
Age at death21.2
Age at death from cemetery records21
Commemoration detailsThe Ypres (Menin Gate) Memorial (Panel 25), 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
113
Miscellaneous information from
  cemetery records
Son of Agnes EPIS (formerly HENDERSON), 205 Oxford Street, Leederville, Western Australia, and the late John HENDERSON. Native of Quinindi, New South Wales
Family/military connectionsBrothers: 7067 Pte Allen Fenton HENDERSON, 28th Bn, returned to Australia, 14 January 1919; 52153 Pte John Patrick HENDERSON, 28th Bn, returned to Australia, 12 July 1919; Step Father: served in the Army
Other details

War service: Western Front

Medals: British War Medal, Victory Medal

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