The AIF Project

Sydney Harold COLLEY

Regimental number38
Place of birthInverell, New South Wales
SchoolElsmore, Inverell, New South Wales
ReligionPresbyterian
OccupationBlacksmith
AddressDrummoyne, New South Wales
Marital statusSingle
Age at embarkation21
Next of kinMother, Mrs Sarah Ann Colley, 7 College Street, Drummoyne, New South Wales
Previous military serviceNil
Enlistment date29 November 1915
Rank on enlistmentPrivate
Unit name34th Battalion, A Company
AWM Embarkation Roll number23/51/1
Embarkation detailsUnit embarked from Sydney, New South Wales, on board HMAT A20 Hororata on 2 May 1916
Rank from Nominal RollPrivate
Unit from Nominal Roll34th Battalion
FateKilled in Action 7 June 1917
Place of death or woundingMessines, Belgium
Age at death19.7
Age at death from cemetery records22
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
123
Miscellaneous information from
  cemetery records
Parents: Charles and Sarah Ann COLLEY; husband of Maude COLLEY, 74 Belgrave Street, Neutral Bay, New South Wales
Family/military connectionsCousin: 2402 Pte Walter WINKWORTH, 33rd Bn, died of wounds, 23 July 1917.
Other details

War service: Western Front

Medals: British War Medal, Victory Medal

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