The AIF Project

William Henry HARVEY

Regimental number64
Place of birthMount Gambier, South Australia
ReligionPresbyterian
OccupationBlacksmith
AddressMount Gambier, South Australia
Marital statusSingle
Age at embarkation18
Next of kinSister, Miss Jessie C Harvey, Mount Gambier, South Australia
Previous military serviceServed for 4 years in the Cadets, Citizen Military Forces.
Enlistment date3 April 1916
Rank on enlistmentPrivate
Unit name3rd Divisional Cyclist Company
AWM Embarkation Roll number12/6/1
Embarkation detailsUnit embarked from Sydney, New South Wales, on board HMAT A64 Demosthenes on 18 May 1916
Unit from Nominal Roll27th Battalion
FateKilled in Action 4 October 1917
Age at death from cemetery records19
Place of burialNo known grave
Commemoration detailsThe Ypres (Menin Gate) Memorial (Panel 23), 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
110
Miscellaneous information from
  cemetery records
Parents: Mary HOWE (formerly HARVEY), Commercial Street, Mount Gambier, South Australia
Other details

War service: Western Front

Disembarked England, July 1916.

Proceeded overseas to France, 4 February 1917.

Admitted to 11th Stationary Hospital, Rouen, 4 April 1917 (trench fever); rejoined Bn, 26 April 1917.

Killed in action, 4 October 1917.

Medals: British War Medal, Victory Medal

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