The AIF Project

Distinguished Conduct Medal

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: Egypt, Gallipoli, Western Front

Joined 7th Bn at Gallipoli, 5 August 1915.

Admitted to 3rd Field Ambulance, 4 September 1915, then to 1st Australian Casualty Clearing Station (dysentery); transferred to Mudros; thence by HS 'Salta' to Alexandria, 4 September 1915; admitted to 10th General Hospital, 9 September 1915.

Embarked for England, 23 September 1915; admitted to 3rd London General Hospital, Wandsworth, 5 October 1915; to Monte Video Camp, Weymouth, 20 March 1916.

Proceeded overseas to France, 25 July 1916; rejoined 7th Bn, 29 July 1916.

Mentioned in Despatches for participation in a successful raid on the enemy trenches on 30th September 1916.

Admitted to 2nd Australian Field Ambulance, 26 November 1916 (bronchitis); transferred to New Zealand Stationary Hospital, Etaples, 26 November 1916; to 4th General Hospital, Rouen, 8 December 1916; to Convalescent Depot, 16 December 1916; discharged to Base Depot, 17 February 1917; rejoined Bn, 28 May 1917.

Admitted to 1st Australian Field Ambulance, 4 July 1917 (gonorrhoea), and transferred to 1st Division Rest Station; rejoined Bn, 14 July 1917. [Reference to gonorrhoea subsequently deleted: diagnosis: 'Non venereal'.]

Reported missing in action, Belgium, 20 September 1917; fate confirmed as killed in action.