The AIF Project

Gladstone SLARKE

Regimental number11535
Place of birthAnnandale, New South Wales
SchoolAnnandale North Public School, Sydney, New South Wales
ReligionChurch of England
OccupationClerk
Address200 Young Street, Annandale, New South Wales
Marital statusSingle
Age at embarkation18
Next of kinFather, R Slarke, 200 Young Street, Annandale, New South Wales
Previous military serviceNil
Enlistment date11 October 1915
Rank on enlistmentGunner
Unit name5th Field Artillery Brigade, Reinforcement 3
AWM Embarkation Roll number13/33/2
Embarkation detailsUnit embarked from Sydney, New South Wales, on board RMS Osterley on 15 January 1916
Rank from Nominal RollGunner
Unit from Nominal Roll5th Field Artillery Brigade
FateKilled in Action 5 October 1917
Place of death or woundingMenin Road, Ypres, Belgium
Age at death20.10
Place of burialNo known grave
Commemoration detailsThe Ypres (Menin Gate) Memorial, 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
14
Miscellaneous information from
  cemetery records
Listed on Annandale North Public School Roll of Honour ('For King and Country'), New South Wales. Parents: Reuben and Kate SLARKE, 30 Marion Street, Leichhardt, New South Wales. Native of Annandale, New South Wales
Family/military connectionsBrothers: 19367 Lance Corporal Albert SLARKE, 1st Signal Squadron, returned to Australia, 3 July 1919; 8103 Corporal Alfred Jeffrey SLARKE, 2nd Australian General Hospital, returned to Australia, 19 August 1919.
Other details

War service: Western Front

Medals: British War Medal, Victory Medal

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