The AIF Project

2nd Lieutenant

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: Egypt, Western Front

Disembarked Suez, 7 December 1915.

Admitted to 8th Field Ambulance, Serapeum, 17 January 1916 (influenza); discharged to duty, 19 January 1916.

Embarked Alexandria to join the British Expeditionary Force, 16 June 1916; disembarked Marseilles, 23 June 1916.

Promoted 2nd Lieutenant, 29 July 1916.

Wounded in action, 7 October 1916 (gas), and admitted to 2nd Casualty Clearing Station; transferred same day to Ambulance train no 25, and admitted to 14th General Hospital, 7 October 1916; to England, 15 October 1916, and admitted to 3rd London General Hospital, Wandsworth; to 5th Auxiliary Hospital, Digswell House, 23 October 1916. Promoted Lieutenant, 26 November 1916. Discharged from 5th Auxiliary Hospital, 5 February 1917; marched in to No 1 Command Depot, Perham Downs, 6 February 1917. Proceeded overseas to France, 16 May 1917; rejoined unit, 20 May 1917.

To 2nd Army Rest Camp, 27 August 1917;rejoined unit, 7 September 1917.

Killed in action, 27 September 1917. Sstatement on file reads: 'This Officer was first wounded by a shell in the groin and later killed by a bullet during the operations at Polygon Wood on 26.9.17. He was buried ... Polygon Wood ... Carlisle Farm-Jerk House.'