Henry Stephen WRATHALL

Date of birth15 September 1886
Place of birthGeelong, Victoria
ReligionChurch of England
OccupationPlantation manager
AddressBrunswick, Victoria
Marital statusMarried
Age at embarkation32
Next of kinWife, Mrs A E F Wrathall, Charsfield, Cossells Road, Brunswick, Victoria
Enlistment date16 May 1915
Rank on enlistment2nd Lieutenant
Unit name8th Battalion, 8th Reinforcement
AWM Embarkation Roll number23/25/3
Embarkation detailsUnit embarked from Melbourne, Victoria, on board SS Makarini on 15 September 1915
Rank from Nominal RollLieutenant
Unit from Nominal Roll60th Battalion
FateKilled in Action 15 October 1917
Age at death from cemetery records34
Place of burialNo known grave
Commemoration detailsThe Ypres (Menin Gate) Memorial (Panel 31), 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
171
Miscellaneous information from
  cemetery records
Parents: Stephen and Adeline WRATHALL; Wife: Annie Eva Frances WRATHALL
Other details

Medals: 1914-15 Star, British War Medal, Victory Medal