The AIF Project

John Ellenduff BEATTS

Regimental number3122
Place of birthHalifax Queensland
SchoolHalifax State School, Queensland
Other trainingHalifax Rifle Club
ReligionChurch of England
OccupationCinematograph operator
AddressHalifax, Queensland
Marital statusSingle
Age at embarkation22
Next of kinMother, Mrs Ida Sophia Beatts, Halifax, Queensland
Enlistment date14 October 1916
Rank on enlistmentPrivate
Unit name49th Battalion, 8th Reinforcement
AWM Embarkation Roll number23/66/3
Embarkation detailsUnit embarked from Sydney, New South Wales, on board HMAT A64 Demosthenes on 23 December 1916
Rank from Nominal RollPrivate
Unit from Nominal Roll49th Battalion
FateKilled in Action 27 September 1917
Place of death or woundingPolygon Wood, Ypres, Belgium
Age at death22
Age at death from cemetery records23
Place of burialNo known grave
Commemoration detailsThe Ypres (Menin Gate) Memorial (Panel 29), 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
147
Miscellaneous information from
  cemetery records
Parents: John Leyland and Ida Sophia BEATTS, Halifax, Queensland
Family/military connectionsUncle: 3349 Pte Carl BECK, 2nd Light Horse Regiment, killed in action, 31 October 1917.
Other details

War service: Western Front

Medals: British War Medal, Victory Medal

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