The AIF Project

Enlisted September 1914 - 14th Bn; sailed for Egypt, December 1914; landed Gallipoli, 25 April 1915; dangerously wounded, 27 April 1915; hospital Egypt and England, 1916; Staff Sergeant Australian H.Q. London until January 1917; cadet at Oxford until May; commissioned 14th Bn, France, May until August; killed in action Messines, Belgium, August 1917.

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

Embarked to join the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, Gallipoli, 12 April 1915. Wounded in action (date not recorded) and admitted to HS 'Derflinger' (gun shot wound, right side and back); transferred to 17th General Hospital, Alexandria, 1 May 1915; to England, 1 June 1915 (no further hospital details recorded on B103).

Promoted Sergeant, 1 February 1916. Attached for duty with Furlough Department, AIF Administrative Headquarters, 23 May 1916. Promoted Temporary Staff Sergeant, 13 September 1916. On Command to School of Instruction, Balliol College, Oxford, 3 January 1917, and taken on strength of No 6 Officer Cadet Battalion. Attended Staff College at Cambridge, 7 April 1917. Appointed 2nd Lieutenant, 27 April 1917. Proceeded overseas to France, 13 May 1917; taken on strength, 14th Bn, 17 May 1917.

Killed in action, Belgium, 8 August 1917.