The AIF Project

Harry Clive JONES

Regimental number608
Place of birthWandiligong, Victoria
SchoolWandiligong State School, Victoria
ReligionPresbyterian
OccupationWinehman
AddressBright, Victoria
Marital statusMarried
Age at embarkation31
Next of kinWife, Mrs Ivy Jones, Bright, Victoria
Previous military serviceMember of a rifle club since the age of sixteen.
Enlistment date28 February 1916
Date of enlistment from Nominal Roll29 February 1916
Rank on enlistmentLance Corporal
Unit name37th Battalion, B Company
AWM Embarkation Roll number23/54/1
Embarkation detailsUnit embarked from Melbourne, Victoria, on board HMAT A34 Persic on 3 June 1916
Rank from Nominal RollSergeant
Unit from Nominal Roll37th Battalion
FateKilled in Action 9 July 1917
Place of death or woundingMessines, Belgium
Age at death32
Age at death from cemetery records32
Place of burialNo known grave
Commemoration detailsThe Ypres (Menin Gate) Memorial (Panel 25), 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
123
Miscellaneous information from
  cemetery records
Parents: Thomas and Margaret Claughan JONES; husband of Ivy I. JONES, Bright, Victoria. Native of Wandiligong, Victoria
Family/military connectionsCousin, Harry Peacock, killed at Passchendaele; Cousin Joe Peacock, returned and won Military Medal and Bar, Belgian Croix de Guerre and D.C.M.
Other details

War service: Western Front

Medals: British War Medal, Victory Medal

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