The AIF Project

Claud Clement Godfrey ANSTIS

Regimental number7095
Place of birthStoke, Devonport, Plymouth, Devon, England
SchoolCattdown School, Plymouth Devon
Other trainingWent to Australia to learn farming.
Age on arrival in Australia18
ReligionPresbyterian
OccupationFarmer
AddressMackee's Hill, Tomki, New South Wales
Marital statusSingle
Age at embarkation19
Next of kinMother, Mrs L Anstis, 36 Arundel Road, Croydon Surrey, England
Enlistment date28 September 1916
Date of enlistment from Nominal Roll27 September 1916
Rank on enlistmentPrivate
Unit name15th Battalion, 23rd Reinforcement
AWM Embarkation Roll number23/32/2
Embarkation detailsUnit embarked from Sydney, New South Wales, on board HMAT A72 Beltana on 25 November 1916
Regimental number from Nominal Roll6931
Rank from Nominal RollPrivate
Unit from Nominal Roll15th Battalion
Other details from Roll of Honour CircularBuried entrance to Fannys Farm.
FateKilled in Action 14 August 1918
Place of death or woundingMessines, Belgium
Age at death20
Place of burialNo known grave
Commemoration detailsThe Ypres (Menin Gate) Memorial (Panel 17), 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
74
Family/military connectionsBrother: 4073 Pte Roy ANSTIS, 25th Bn, killed in action, 30 October 1917.
Other details

War service: Western Front

Medals: British War Medal, Victory Medal

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