The AIF Project

Victor Lawrence HANNAN

Regimental number2474
Place of birthHendon, Middlesex, England
SchoolState School, Doncaster and South Melbourne, Victoria
Age on arrival in Australia6 months
ReligionMethodist
OccupationRubberworker
Marital statusMarried
Age at embarkation25
Next of kinWife, Mrs E Hannan, 95 Cobden Street, South Melbourne, Victoria
Previous military serviceServed for 6 months in the Naval Reserve.
Enlistment date12 July 1915
Rank on enlistmentPrivate
Unit name29th Battalion, 4th Reinforcement
AWM Embarkation Roll number23/46/2
Embarkation detailsUnit embarked from Melbourne, Victoria, on board HMAT A68 Anchises on 14 March 1916
Regimental number from Nominal Roll2474A
Rank from Nominal RollPrivate
Unit from Nominal Roll46th Battalion
Other details from Roll of Honour Circular'He was a carpenter and through slackness of the Building Trade he enlisted. Wounded first occasion 4th September, 1916'. Details from Wife.
FateKilled in Action 10 June 1917
Place of death or woundingMessines, Belgium
Age at death from cemetery records27
Place of burialNo known grave
Commemoration detailsThe Ypres (Menin Gate) Memorial (Panel 27), 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
141
Miscellaneous information from
  cemetery records
Parents: Alexander and Ellen HANNAN; husband of Elizabeth HANNAN, 141 Station Street, Port Melbourne. Native of Hendon, England
Family/military connectionsBrother-in-law: 53 Pte Frederick Henry GREENWOOD, 5th Bn, returned to Australia, 3 June 1915.
Other details

War service: Western Front

Medals: British War Medal, Victory Medal

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