The AIF Project

2nd Lieutenant

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

Embarked from Alexandria to join the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force (Gallipoli), 2 March 1915.

Promoted 2nd Lieutenant, 28 April 1915.

Wounded in action, 19 May 1915 (bullet wound, left hand); admitted to 2nd General Hospital, Ghezireh, Egypt, 28 May 1915.

Medical Board, 22 June 1915, investigated his claims of abdominal pains: found that 'after a further short period of treatment he should be equal to light duty in Egypt though not necessarily subsequently at the front'.

Placed on temporary Base Duty, 20 July 1915.

Admitted to 15th General Hospital, Alexandria, 29 August 1915; transferred to England on board HS 'Asturias', 15 September 1915.

Admitted to Monte Video Hospital, 10 April 1916 (venereal disease); discharged, 10 May 1916.

Proceeded overseas to France, and marched in to 1st Australian Division Base Depot, Etaples, 16 August 1916; rejoined 9th Bn, 18 August 1916.

Admitted to New Zealand Stationary Hospital, 4 December 1916 (laryngitis); transferred to 2nd General Hospital, Havre, 12 December 1916; discharged to Base Details, 18 December 1916.

Promoted Lieutenant, 16 December 1916. Rejoined Bn, 23 December 1916.

Admitted to 1st Australian Field Ambulance, 17 March 1917 (mumps), and tranferred to Corps Mumps Station; discharged to duty, 6 April 1917.

On leave to England, 22 April 1917.

Killed in action, 20 September 1917.