Frank Selwood KENDALL

Regimental number468
Place of birthOatlands, Tasmania
SchoolState School, Dunolly, Victoria
ReligionChurch of England
OccupationFarmer
AddressHamilton, Victoria
Marital statusMarried
Age at embarkation26
Next of kinWife, Mrs Charlotte Payne Kendall, Hamilton, Victoria
Enlistment date13 June 1916
Date of enlistment from Nominal Roll18 June 1916
Rank on enlistmentPrivate
Unit nameMachine Gun Company 8, Reinforcement 7
AWM Embarkation Roll number24/13/3
Embarkation detailsUnit embarked from Melbourne, Victoria, on board HMAT A38 Ulysses on 25 October 1916
Rank from Nominal RollPrivate
Unit from Nominal Roll5th Machine Gun Battalion
FateKilled in Action 26 September 1917
Place of death or woundingMenin Road, Ypres, Belgium
Age at death27
Age at death from cemetery records27
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
178
Miscellaneous information from
  cemetery records
Parents: Frederick and Elizabeth KENDALL; husband of Charlotte P. KENDALL, Gray Street, Hamilton. Native of Oatlands, Tasmania
Family/military connectionsBrother-in-law: 5540 Corporal Augustus Henry LACKMANN, 27th Bn, killed in action, 20 September 1917.
Other details

Married Charlotte Payne Kendall (nee Lackmann) and had two sons, Michael and Fred.

War service: Western Front

Medals: British War Medal, Victory Medal