Leslie Francis HOSKING

Regimental number3008
Place of birthVictoria
ReligionMethodist
OccupationAccountant
AddressPerth, Western Australia
Marital statusMarried
Age at embarkation33
Next of kinWife, Mrs Jessie Hosking, corner of St George's Terrace and King Street, Perth, Western Australia
Enlistment date24 January 1916
Date of enlistment from Nominal Roll23 December 1915
Rank on enlistmentPrivate
Unit name44th Battalion, 7th Reinforcement
AWM Embarkation Roll number23/61/3
Embarkation detailsUnit embarked from Fremantle, Western Australia, on board HMAT A28 Miltiades on 29 January 1917
Rank from Nominal RollPrivate
Unit from Nominal Roll5th Machine Gun Battalion
Other details from Roll of Honour CircularWorked as an Accountant before the start of the war.
FateKilled in Action 20 October 1917
Place of death or woundingYpres, Belgium
Age at death35
Age at death from cemetery records35
Place of burialNo known grave
Commemoration detailsThe Ypres (Menin Gate) Memorial (Panel 31), 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
116
Miscellaneous information from
  cemetery records
Son of Jane CHAPPELL (formerly HOSKING), and the late Harry HOSKING; husband of Jessie HOSKING, "Abbeycraig", Bayswater Road, Darlinghurst, New South Wales
Other details

War service: Western Front

Medals: British War Medal, Victory Medal