The AIF Project

Phillip Edgar WILLIAMS

Regimental number938
Place of birthMintaro, South Australia
ReligionMethodist
OccupationLabourer
AddressMintaro, South Australia
Marital statusSingle
Age at embarkation18
Next of kinFather, Phillip Williams, same address
Enlistment date17 February 1916
Rank on enlistmentPrivate
Unit name43rd Battalion, 2nd Reinforcement
AWM Embarkation Roll number23/60/2
Embarkation detailsUnit embarked from Adelaide, South Australia, on board HMAT A70 Ballarat on 12 August 1916
Rank from Nominal RollPrivate
Unit from Nominal Roll3rd Machine Gun Battalion
FateKilled in Action 4 October 1917
Age at death from cemetery records20
Place of burialNo known grave
Commemoration detailsThe Ypres (Menin Gate) Memorial (Panel 31), 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
179
Miscellaneous information from
  cemetery records
Commemorated in West Terrace Cemetery, Adelaide, South Australia. Headstone inscription reads: 'He died, not in his native land/But under foreign skies/Far away from those who loved him/In a heroe's grave he lies./No loving mother's gentle hand/To wipe the death dew from his brow/No token of love in that far off land/To mark the spot where he sleepeth now.' Parents: Philip and Julia Esther WILLIAMS, Dean Street, Prospect, South Australia
Other details

War service: Western Front

Medals: British War Medal, Victory Medal

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