The AIF Project

Harold Ernest DUNCAN

Regimental number6496
Date of birth1 June 1892
Place of birthPeterhead, South Australia
SchoolLe Fever's Peninsula Public School, South Australia
ReligionCongregational
OccupationBlacksmith
AddressWayville, South Australia
Marital statusMarried
Age at embarkation23
Next of kinWife, Mrs M V Duncan, Plead Street, Largs Bay, South Australia
Enlistment date21 August 1916
Rank on enlistmentPrivate
Unit name10th Battalion, 21st Reinforcement
AWM Embarkation Roll number23/27/4
Embarkation detailsUnit embarked from Melbourne, Victoria, on board HMAT A16 Port Melbourne on 21 October 1916
Rank from Nominal RollPrivate
Unit from Nominal Roll10th Battalion
FateKilled in Action 3 November 1917
Place of death or woundingZonnebeke, Belgium
Age at death25
Age at death from cemetery records24
Place of burialNo known grave
Commemoration detailsThe Ypres (Menin Gate) Memorial (Panel 17), 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
58
Miscellaneous information from
  cemetery records
Parents: Robert C and Jessie DUNCAN, husband of Mrs M.V. DUNCAN, Fletcher Road, Peterhead, South Australia. Native of Largs Bay, South Australia
Family/military connectionsBrother-in-law: 3217 Pte Stanley Clarence Roy COATES, 32nd Bn, killed in action, 13 October 1917.
Other details

Medals: 1914-15 Star, British War Medal, Victory Medal

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