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

Taken on strength, 19th Bn, Tel-el-Kebir, 8 January 1916.

Embarked Alexandria to join the British Expeditionary Force, France, 18 March 1916; disembarked Marseilles, 25 March 1916.

Wounded in action, France, 2 August 1916; admitted to No. 3 Casualty Clearing Station and transferred to Ambulance Train, 2 August 1916; admitted to No. 4 General Hospital (gun shot wound, face), Camiers, 4 August 1916; transferred to No. 20 General Hospital (gun shot wound, upper jaw), Camiers, 7 August 1916; embarked Calais, Hospital Ship 'Newhaven', for treatment in England, 15 August 1916; admitted to Queen Alexandria Military Hospital, Milbank, 15 August 1916; discharged to furlough, 25 November 1916.

Marched in, No. 1 Convalescent Depot, Perham Downs, 5 December 1916; classified B1a.

Reclassified B1a2, Perham Downs, 30 April 1917.

Marched in, Overseas Training Brigade, Perham Downs, 8 August 1917.

Embarked Southampton to rejoin unit in the field, 10 September 1917; marched in, 2nd Australian Divisional Depot, Havre, 11 September 1917; marched out to unit, 18 September 1917; rejoined 19th Bn, France, 20 September 1917.

Killed in action, Belgium, 29 September 1917.