The AIF Project

Edward Malgwyn EVANS

Regimental number2657
Place of birthCarisbrook, Victoria
Other NamesEdward Malguyn
SchoolState School
ReligionPresbyterian
OccupationBlacksmith
AddressCarisbrook, Victoria
Marital statusSingle
Age at embarkation20
Next of kinFather, Edward Malgwyn Evans, King Street, Carisbrook, Victoria
Previous military serviceServed in the Cadets.
Enlistment date15 August 1916
Date of enlistment from Nominal Roll15 August 1916
Rank on enlistmentPrivate
Unit name59th Battalion, 6th Reinforcement
AWM Embarkation Roll number23/76/4
Embarkation detailsUnit embarked from Melbourne, Victoria, on board HMAT A71 Nestor on 2 October 1916
Rank from Nominal RollLance Corporal
Unit from Nominal Roll59th Battalion
Other details from Roll of Honour Circular

'While serving in France he made the supreme sacrifice for liberty and Empire in the famous fight at Polygon Wood. He was popular among the men both Officers and Ptes. They spoke of him with the highest of terms as a soldier and a man.' Details from Father.

FateKilled in Action 26 September 1917
Place of death or woundingPolygon Wood, Ypres, Belgium
Age at death21.5
Place of burialNo known grave
Commemoration detailsThe Ypres (Menin Gate) Memorial (Panel 29), 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
167
Miscellaneous information from
  cemetery records
Parents: Edward and Dorothea EVANS, King Street, Carisbrook, Victoria
Family/military connectionsBrother: 4181 Corporal Henry Evan EVANS, 5th Bn, killed in action, 20 September 1917.
Other details

War service: Western Front

Medals: British War Medal, Victory Medal

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