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: Egypt, Western Front

Admitted to 3rd Australian Hospital, Cairo, 1 February 1916 (influenza); discharged to duty, 14 February 1916. Taken on strength, 49th Bn, Tel el Kebir, 29 February 1916. Found guilty, 27 March 1916, of being absent without leave, 2100, 25 March, to 1200, 26 March 1916: awarded 32 hours' confined to camp, and forfeited 2 days' pay.

Embarked Alexandria to join the British Expeditionary

Force, 5 June 1916; disembarked Marseilles, 12 June 1916.

Wounded in action, 5 September 1916; remained at duty.

To School of Instruction, 5 November 1916; rejoined unit, 20 November 1916.

Wounded in action, 2nd occasion, 5 April 1917 (gun shot wound, left foot), and admitted to 4th Australian Field Ambulance; transferred same day to 2nd Casualty Clearing Station; to 11th Stationary Hospital, Rouen, 5 April 1917; to 2nd Convalescent Depot, 9 April 1917; to England, 21 April 1917, and admitted to 3rd Southern General Hospital, Oxford, 23 April 1917; to 3rd Auxiliary Hospital, Dartford, 14 May 1917; discharged on furlough, 25 May 1917, to report to 2nd Convalescent Depot, Weymouth, 9 June 1917. Proceeded overseas to France, 8 August 1917; rejoined unit, 27 August 1917.

Killed in action, Belgium, 26 September 1917.

Medals: British War Medal, Victory Medal