The AIF Project

Edwin HUDSON

Regimental number6744
Place of birthOxford, England
SchoolNational School, England
Age on arrival in Australia17
ReligionChurch of England
OccupationFarmer
AddressLeeton, New South Wales
Marital statusSingle
Age at embarkation19
Next of kinFather, Mr E Hudson, Oxford, England
Enlistment date18 July 1916
Rank on enlistmentPrivate
Unit name14th Battalion, 22nd Reinforcement
AWM Embarkation Roll number23/31/4
Embarkation detailsUnit embarked from Sydney, New South Wales, on board HMAT SS Port Napier on 17 November 1916
Rank from Nominal RollPrivate
Unit from Nominal Roll29th Battalion
Other details from Roll of Honour Circular"A Patrol Leader in the Oxford Boy Scouts. He had won medal for shooting and also won Silver Cup with his Patrol of Scouts in Scotland. Also won the Cross Gun at Codford Camp just before leaving for France." Details from Father.
FateKilled in Action 23 November 1917
Place of death or woundingMessines, Belgium
Age at death20
Age at death from cemetery records20
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
115
Miscellaneous information from
  cemetery records
Parents: Edwin and Rosenia HUDSON, 1 High Street, New Headington, Oxon, England
Other details

War service: Western Front

Medals: British War Medal, Victory Medal

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