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

Taken on strength, 24th Bn, Gallipoli, 29 September 1915. Re-allotted Regimental No 1813A. To hospital sick, 4 December 1915; admitted to 2nd Australian General Hospital, Ghezireh, Egypt, 15 December 1915 (rheumatism); discharged to Overseas Base, 19 January 1916; rejoined Bn, Moascar, 11 March 1916.

Embarked Alexandria to join the British Expeditionary Force, 20 March 1916; disembarked Marseilles, 26 March 1916.

Admitted to 2nd Canadian Casualty Clearing Station, 30 March 1916 (burns, right foot); admitted to 7th Australian Field Ambulance, 20 May 1916; discharged to duty, 22 May 1916. Appointed Lance Corporal, 30 July 1916; Temporary Corporal, Belgium, 4 September 1916; Sergeant, 27 October 1916.

Admitted to Casualty Clearing Station, 21 November 1916 (trench feet), and transferred by Ambulance Train to 11th Stationary Hospital, Rouen, 22 November 1917; to England, 24 November 1916, and admitted to 3rd Southern General Hospital, Oxford, 25 November 1916 (trench feet: slight); discharged on furlough, 10 January 1917, to report to No 1 Command Depot, Perham Downs, 25 January 1917. Marched in to No 4 Command Depot, 30 January 1917. Transferred to 65th Bn, Wareham, 22 March 1917.

Attended School of Musketry, Tidworth, 3-28 July 1917; qualified as 1st Class with a fair working knowledge of Lewis Gun. Transferred to 24th Bn, 16 August 1917.

Proceeded overseas to France, 1 September 1917; taken on strength, 24th Bn, 8 September 1917.

Wounded and missing in action, Belgium, 4 October 1917.; subsequently confirmed killed in action.