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: Egypt, Gallipoli, Western Front

Admitted to 6th Field Ambulance, Gallipoli, 6 December 1915 (dysentery, malaria); transferred to Hospital Ship 'Grantully Castle', 10 December 1915, and admitted to 1st Australian General Hospital, Heliopolis, 14 December 1915. Discharged to duty, 13 January 1916.

Transferred to 2nd Divisional Ammunition Column, 11 March 1916.

Proceeded from Alexandria to join the British Expeditionary Force, 20 March 1916; disembarked Marseilles, 27 March 1916.

Transferred to Trench Mortar Batteries, 16 August 1916, and taken on strngth, 2nd Division Trench Mortar Battery.

Found guilty of being absent from unit for 24 hours, 8-9 December 1916: awarded forfeiture of 8 days' pay. Admitted to 51st General Hospital, Etaples, 16 February 1917; discharged to Base Depot after treatment for venereal disease, 19 April 1917; rejoined unit, 27 April 1917.

Detached to 1st Anzac Trench Mortar School for instruction, 5 June 1917; rejoined unit from detachment, 16 June 1917.

Admitted to 72nd Field Ambulance, 25 July 1917 (gonorrhoea); transferred to 39th General Hospital, 31 July 1917; period of treatment for venereal disease ends, 8 August 1917; thereafter treated for scabies until discharged to Base Depot, 21 August 1917.

Killed in action, Belgium, 21 September 1917. Buried by Rev W. Astley-Brown CF.