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: Egypt, Gallipoli, Western Front

Embarked for Gallipoli, 16 May 1915. Admitted to 2nd Light Horse Field Ambulance, 24 September 1915 (influenza); transferred by HS 'Gascon' to Malta, 27 September 1915; to General Hospital, Gibraltar, 3 October 1915. Embarked for England, 8 November 1915; admitted to 4th Southern General Hospital, Plymouth,12 November 1915. Found guilty, 17 February 1916, of being absent without leave from 15.2.16 to 16.2.16: awarded 24 hours' detention and forfeiture of 2 days' pay. Transferred to 32nd Bn, 6 September 1916. Admitted to Bulford Military Hospital, 10 September 1916 (venereal disease); discharged, 24 November 1916; total period of treatment: 76 days.

Proceeded overseas to France, 17 December 1916; taken on strength, 32nd Bn, 23 December 1916.

Admitted to 1st New Zealand Stationary Hospital, 4 January 1917 (gastritis). Transferred to 5th General Hospital, Rouen, 10 January 1917; to England, 24 January 1917, and admitted to 1st London General Hospital, Camberwell, 26 January 1917. Marched in to No. 1 Command Depot, Perham Downs, from furlough, 1 May 1917.

Proceeded overseas to France, 22 May 1917. Transferred to 50th Bn, 11 June 1917.

Reported wounded and missing in action, 18 October 1917; subsequently confirmed as killed in action.