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: Western Front

Embarked Fremantle, 23 December 1916, and appointed Acting Sergeant (voyage only); admitted to ship's hospital, at sea, 30 December 1916 (venereal disease); discharged from ship's hospital, 6 January 1917; total period of treatment for venereal disease: 7 days; disembarked Devonport, England, 16 February 1917.

Marched into 12th Training Bn, Codford, 6 March 1917.

Admitted to 1st Australian Dermatological Hospital, Bulford, 16 March 1917; transferred to Parkhouse Military Hospital, 3 April 1917; discharged, 3 May 1917; total period of treatment for venereal disease: 49 days.

Admitted to No 1 VD Hospital, Parkhouse, 11 April 1917; discharged to Convalescent Training Company, Perham Downs, 12 May 1917.

Appointed Acting Lance Corporal, 8 June 1917.

Proceeded overseas to France, 5 September 1917; taken on strength, 48th Bn, in the field, 16 September 1917.

Killed in action, Belgium, 12 October 1917.