The AIF Project

Stanley McLENNAN

Regimental number1784
Date of birth25 June 1895
Place of birthBibbenluke, New South Wales
SchoolBibbenluke Public School, New South Wales
Other trainingStott and Hoare's Business College, Sydney, New South Wales
ReligionPresbyterian
OccupationBank clerk
AddressBibbenluke via Bombala, New South Wales
Marital statusSingle
Age at embarkation19
Next of kinFather, Mr W McLennan, Bibbenluke via Bombala, New South Wales
Previous military service11th Light Horse
Enlistment date28 January 1915
Rank on enlistmentPrivate
Unit name13th Battalion, 4th Reinforcement
AWM Embarkation Roll number23/30/2
Embarkation detailsUnit embarked from Sydney, New South Wales, on board HMAT A9 Shropshire on 17 March 1915
Other details from Roll of Honour CircularPassed Bankers' Institute examination. Joined the Bank of New South Wales, Haymarket branch, Sydney, 19 November 1912. Transferred to Cooma branch, 25 March 1913.
Age at death from cemetery records22
Place of burialNo known grave
Commemoration detailsThe Ypres (Menin Gate) Memorial (Panel 17), 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
70
Miscellaneous information from
  cemetery records
Parents: William and Jane McLENNAN, Bibbenluke, New South Wales
Other details

War service: Egypt, Gallipoli, Western Front

Wounded in action, Lone Pine, August 1915.

Promoted Corporal, 1 August 1916.

Medals: 1914-15 Star, British War Medal, Victory Medal
Sources'Bank of New South Wales Roll of Honour' (Sydney, 1921), p. 276.

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