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, 14 February 1917; disembarked Plymouth, England, 11 April 1917.

Found guilty of overstaying leave pass, Machine Gun Company, Belton Park, from midnight, 27 May-7 pm, 29 May 1917: awarded 3 days' confinement to barracks and forfeiture of 2 days' pay.

Proceeded overseas to France, 5 June 1917; taken on strength, 11th Machine Gun Company, 17 June 1917.

Admitted to 9th Australian Field Ambulance, 1 July 1917 (influenza); transferred to 3rd Divisional Rest Station, 4 July 1917; rejoined unit, 17 July 1917.

Killed in action, Belgium, 14 October 1917.

Medals: British War Medal, Victory Medal