The AIF Project

Samuel BUSBY

Regimental number4995
Place of birthGlasgow, Scotland
ReligionPresbyterian
OccupationWharf labourer
Address125 Cleveland Street, Redfern, New South Wales
Marital statusSingle
Age at embarkation24
Next of kinFather, Samuel Busby, 125 Cleveland Street, Redfern, New South Wales
Enlistment date8 September 1915
Rank on enlistmentSapper
Unit name1st Field Company Engineers, Reinforcement 13
AWM Embarkation Roll number14/20/3
Embarkation detailsUnit embarked from Sydney, New South Wales, on board HMAT A35 Berrima on 17 December 1915
Rank from Nominal RollSapper
Unit from Nominal Roll14th Field Company Engineers
Other details from Roll of Honour CircularEnlisted 8 September 1915. Taken on strength, 14th Field Company Engineers, 18 March 1916. Wounded in the Fleurbaix sector, France, 20 July 1916.
FateKilled in Action 30 October 1917
Place of death or woundingPasschendaele, Ypres, Belgium
Age at death26
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
23
Other details

War service: Western Front

Medals: British War Medal, Victory Medal

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