The AIF Project

Distinguished Conduct Medal

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.

Distinguished Conduct Medal

War service: Western Front

Embarked Melbourne, 28 July 1916; disembarked Plymouth, England, 11 September 1916, and marched in to 7th Training Bn, Perham Downs.

Admitted to 10th Field Ambulance, 4 October 1916; transferred to 1st Australian Dermatological Hospital, Bulford, 11 October 1916; transferred to Parkhouse, 12 November 1916; discharged, 23 December 1916; total period of treatment for venereal disease: 81 days.

Proceeded overseas to France, 4 February 1917; marched out to the front, 6 February 1917; rejoined 37th Bn, in the field, 7 February 1917.

Admitted to 9th Field Ambulance, 27 February 1917 (influenza); transferred to Divisional Rest Station, 28 February 1917; to 11th Field Ambulance, 28 February 1917; to 3rd Division Rest Station, 28 February 1917; to Reinforcements Camp, 8 March 1917; rejoined Bn, in the field, 11 March 1917.

Detached for duty with 3rd Canadian Tunnelling Company, 27 April 1917; rejoined Bn from detachment, 4 May 1917.

Promoted Corporal, 8 June 1917.

On leave to England, 11 June 1917; rejoined Bn, in the field, from leave, 24 June 1917.

Awarded Distinguished Conduct Medal.

Admitted to 10th Field Ambulance, 13 September 1917 (influenza); transferred to 58th General Hospital, St Omer, 14 September 1917; discharged to duty, 24 September 1917.

Wounded in action, 12 October 1917; Anzac Section previously reported wounded, now, 12 December 1917, report wounded and missing.

Court of Enquiry, held in the field, 2 May 1918, pronounced fate as 'killed in action, 12 October 1918'.