The AIF Project

Percival Harry CLARK

Regimental number6562
Place of birthBrightling East, Sussex, England
SchoolElementary, England
Age on arrival in Australia24
ReligionChurch of England
OccupationPlumber
AddressPort Hedland, Western Australia
Marital statusSingle
Age at embarkation33
Next of kinFather, C Clark, Bayford, Wincanton, Somerset, England
Previous military serviceEngineer volunteer, Fulham, England
Enlistment date4 January 1917
Rank on enlistmentPrivate
Unit name28th Battalion, 19th Reinforcement
AWM Embarkation Roll number23/45/4
Embarkation detailsUnit embarked from Fremantle, Western Australia, on board HMAT A28 Miltiades on 29 January 1917
Rank from Nominal RollPrivate
Unit from Nominal Roll28th Battalion
FateKilled in Action 28 October 1917
Place of death or woundingPasschendaele, Ypres, Belgium
Age at death34
Place of burialNo known grave
Commemoration detailsThe Ypres (Menin Gate) Memorial (Panel 23), 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
112
Miscellaneous information from
  cemetery records
Town. Port Hedland
Family/military connectionsBrother: 6405 Pte Albert Edward CLARK, 27th Bn, returned to Australia, 22 September 1919.
Other details

War service: Western Front

Medals: British War Medal, Victory Medal

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