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.

Enlisted, 17 September 1914; discharged unfit for service, 19 October 1914. Re-enlisted, 14 December 1914.

War service: Egypt, Gallipoli, Western Front

Joined Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, Gallipoli, 30 April 1915. Transferred to 7th Battery, 28 August 1915. Admitted to No. 1 Canadian Hospital, Mudros, 9 November 1915, and transferred to Lowland Casualty Clearing Station, and thence to Australian Rest Camp, 20 November 1915. Rejoined unit at Gallipoli, 7 December 1915. Disembarked Alexandria, 26 December 1915 (general Gallipoli evacuation).

Proceeded from Alexandria to join the British Expeditionary Force, 23 March 1916; disembarked Marseilles, 29 March 1916. Found guilty, 31 March 1916, of being absent without leave 6-9 pm, 30 March 1916: awarded forfeiture of 5 days' pay.

Transferred to Heavy Trench Mortar Battery, 15 May 1916.

Admitted to 51st General Hospital, Etaples, 16 February 1917 (venereal disease); discharged to duty, 26 February 1917.

Killed in action, 10 August 1917.