Regimental number | 944 |
Place of birth | St Kilda, Victoria |
School | Christian Brothers, East St Kilda, Victoria |
Religion | Roman Catholic |
Occupation | Tailor |
Address | 20 Vale Street, St Kilda, Victoria |
Marital status | Single |
Age at embarkation | 21 |
Next of kin | W H Gill, 20 Vale Street, St Kilda, Victoria |
Previous military service | Nil |
Enlistment date | |
Rank on enlistment | Private |
Unit name | 5th Battalion, H Company |
AWM Embarkation Roll number | 23/22/1 |
Embarkation details | Unit embarked from Melbourne, Victoria, on board Transport A3 Orvieto on |
Rank from Nominal Roll | Corporal |
Unit from Nominal Roll | 5th Battalion |
Fate | Killed in Action |
Place of death or wounding | Polygon Wood, Belgium |
Age at death | 24 |
Age at death from cemetery records | 24 |
Place of burial | No known grave |
Commemoration details | The Ypres (Menin Gate) Memorial (Panel 7), 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 | 43 |
Miscellaneous information from cemetery records | Parents: William and Mary GILL, 20 Vale Street, St. Kilda, Victoria |
Family/military connections | Brother: 2368 Pte Oscar Edward GILL, 5th Bn, returned to Australia, 25 August 1917. |