The AIF Project

Cedric James William MOWAT

Regimental number1904
Place of birthAdelaide, South Australia
SchoolPrince Alfred College, Adelaide, South Australia
ReligionChurch of England
OccupationFarmer
AddressCross Roads, Malvern, South Australia
Marital statusSingle
Age at embarkation26
Next of kinAunt, Mrs Walter Hackett, Parade, Norwood, South Australia
Enlistment date2 March 1916
Rank on enlistmentPrivate
Unit name5th Pioneer Battalion, Reinforcement 2
AWM Embarkation Roll number14/17/3
Embarkation detailsUnit embarked from Adelaide, South Australia, on board HMAT A60 Aeneas on 11 April 1916
Rank from Nominal RollSapper
Unit from Nominal Roll2nd Field Artillery Brigade
FateKilled in Action 1 August 1917
Place of death or woundingYpres, Belgium
Age at death27
Age at death from cemetery records27
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
12
Miscellaneous information from
  cemetery records
Parents: William Cormack and Annie Elizbeth MOWAT. Native of Adelaide, South Australia

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