The AIF Project

David BLACK

Regimental number570
Date of birth--/04/1893
Place of birthBallarat, Victoria
ReligionPresbyterian
OccupationFarm labourer
AddressBarkley Street, Footscray, Victoria
Marital statusSingle
Age at embarkation21
Next of kinMrs Agnes Elizabeth Evans, Barkley Street, Footscray, Victoria
Enlistment date21 January 1915
Rank on enlistmentPrivate
Unit name21st Battalion, C Company
AWM Embarkation Roll number23/38/1
Embarkation detailsUnit embarked from Melbourne, Victoria, on board HMAT A38 Ulysses on 10 May 1915
Regimental number from Nominal RollCommissioned
Rank from Nominal RollLieutenant
Unit from Nominal Roll21st Battalion
Promotions

2nd Lieutenant


Unit: 21st Battalion
Promotion date: 12 August 1916

Other details from Roll of Honour CircularEnlisted 21 January 1915. Promoted Corporal, 8 September 1915; Sergeant, 28 November 1915; 2nd Lieutenant, 12 August 1916; Lieutenant, 7 January 1917. Wounded at Pozi?res, 26 August 1916.
FateKilled in Action 4 October 1917
Place of death or woundingBroodseinde, Passchendaele, Belgium
Age at death24
Place of burialNo known grave
Commemoration detailsThe Ypres (Menin Gate) Memorial (Panel 23), 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
93
Other details

War service: Egypt, Gallipoli, Western Front

Medals: 1914-15 Star, British War Medal, Victory Medal

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