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

Taken on strength, 53rd Bn, Tel el Kebir, 14 February 1916.

Illegally absent, 3 March 1916; Court of Enquiry, Tel el Kebir, listed him as a deserter, 26 March 1916.

Medals: automatically forfeited all medal entitlements.

Enlisted in Canada, 28 October 1916.

Embarked Canada, 26 March 1917; disembarked England, 7 April 1917.

Transferred to 58th Bn, Shorncliffe, 2 August 1917.

Arrived in France, 3 August 1917; joined Bn, in the field, 9 September 1917.

Killed in action, 13 November 1917.

OC, B Company, 58th Bn, wrote to father, 16 December 1917: 'It was in the barrage that the enemy placed on us that your son was killed ... He was killed instantly & suffered no pain at all. He was a splendid soldier & one of the best & knew no fear ... If there is anything that I can do for you I would consider it an honor to be of service to the parent of one of my boys.'