The AIF Project

H W YOUNG

Regimental number1087
Place of birthGoodwood, South Australia
SchoolGoodwood Public School, South Australia
Next of kinFather, J W Young, Clarence Park, Adelaide
Previous military serviceNil.
Date of enlistment from Nominal Roll3 June 1915
Unit name25th Battalion, D Company
AWM Embarkation Roll number23/42/1
Embarkation detailsUnit embarked from Brisbane, Queensland, on board HMAT A60 Aeneas on 29 June 1915
Unit from Nominal Roll25th Battalion
Other details from Roll of Honour CircularEnlisted in Queensland on 3 June 1915. Landed at Gallipoli on 11-15 September and remained there until 5-15 December. Contracted an unspecified illness and was sent to hospital in Alexandria.
FateKilled in Action 9 October 1917
Miscellaneous details (Nominal Roll)*Stated to be Harold William Young on NR
Place of death or woundingBroodseinde Ridge, Passchendaele, Belgium
Age at death26
Age at death from cemetery records26
Place of burialNo known grave
Commemoration detailsThe Ypres (Menin Gate) Memorial (Panel 26), 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
??
Miscellaneous information from
  cemetery records
Parents: John William and Fanny YOUNG
Family/military connectionsCousins: Privates Ray Adams, Ray Cluat, Archie Cluat and James Cluat who were all killed in action and Wesley Cluat, who was a prisoner of war in Germany before escaping.

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