The AIF Project

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.

War service: Western Front

Embarked from Melbourne, 25 September 1916; disembarked Plymouth, England, 10 November 1916. Found guilty at sea, 26 October 1916, of leaving a parade without permission: awarded 48 hours' detention. Marched in to 15th Training Bn, Woolwich, 21 November 1916. Found guilty, 14 December 1916, of being absent without leave from 2400, 7 December, to 1100, 12 December 1916: awarded 12 days' Field Punishment No. 2; forfeited 18 days' pay. Proceeded overseas to France, 30 December 1916. Taken on strength, 57th Bn, 7 February 1917.

Found guilty by Field General Court Martial, 3 May 1917, of conduct to the prejudice of good order and military discipline being in possession of and using two pay books, in that he, in the field, between 17 February 1917 and 10 April 1917 had in his possession two pay books: awarded 3 months' imprisonment with hard labour. Commuted to 90 days' Field Punishment No. 2 by Major-General J.T.Hobbs. Period in arrest awaiting trial: 10 April-2 May 1917.

Killed in action, 27 October 1917.

Medals: British War Medal, Victory Medal