The AIF Project

Thomas JARVIS

Regimental number25404
Place of birthSunderland, England
SchoolBowling Green Lane, London
Other trainingRoyal Navy
Age on arrival in Australia33
ReligionChurch of England
OccupationLabourer
Address177 William Street, Perth, Western Australia
Marital statusSingle
Age at embarkation39
Next of kinSister, Mrs M C Roley, Islington, North London, England
Enlistment date31 January 1916
Date of enlistment from Nominal Roll8 February 1916
Rank on enlistmentGunner
Unit nameDivisional Ammunition Column 3, Reinforcement 1
AWM Embarkation Roll number25/91/1
Embarkation detailsUnit embarked from Melbourne, Victoria, on board HMAT A37 Barambah on 27 June 1916
Rank from Nominal RollGunner
Unit from Nominal Roll7th Light Trench Mortar Battery
FateKilled in Action 20 September 1917
Place of death or woundingFrance
Age at death from cemetery records41
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
20
Miscellaneous information from
  cemetery records
Parents: Thomas and Sarah GILLSON. Native of Sunderland, England

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