The AIF Project

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.

War service: Western Front

Embarked from Sydney, 2 May 1916; disembarked Plymouth, England, 23 June 1916.

Proceeded overseas to France, 16 September 1916.

Admitted to 1st New Zealand Stationary Hospital, Amiens, 24 October 1916 (pyrexia unknown origin); rejoined unit, 10 November 1916.

Admitted to 2nd Australian Field Ambulance, 11 November 1916 (debility); transferred to England, 20 November 1916 (influenza); admitted to 1st Southern General Hospital, 21 November 1916. Discharged from hospital, 29 December 1916, and granted furlough, to report to No. 1 Command Depot, Perham Downs, 13 January 1917.

Proceeded overseas to France, 3 February 1917. Admitted to 39th General Hospital, Havre, 26 July 1917; discharged to Base Depot, 7 September 1917; total treatment for venereal disease: 44 days. Rejoined unit, 24 October 1917.

Killed in action, 4 November 1917.

Medals: British War Medal, Victory Medal

Mrs Daines was advised by Base Records, 24 April 1922, that: 'It has now been ascertained that this report of burial [20 December 1920, that DAINES had been buried in Tyne Cot British Cemetery