Wilfred Joseph BENNETT

Regimental number421
Place of birthCirencester, Gloucester, England
SchoolStill's Boarding School, Warminster, Wiltshire, England
Age on arrival in Australia25
ReligionChurch of England
OccupationCommercial traveller
Address16 Castle Street, Cirencester, Gloucestershire, England
Marital statusSingle
Age at embarkation27
Next of kinFather, Charles Bennett, 16 Castle Street, Cirencester, Gloucestershire, England
Previous military serviceNil
Enlistment date22 April 1915
Rank on enlistmentPrivate
Unit name20th Battalion, A Company
AWM Embarkation Roll number23/37/1
Embarkation detailsUnit embarked from Sydney, New South Wales, on board HMAT A35 Berrima on 25 June 1915
Rank from Nominal RollPrivate
Unit from Nominal Roll20th Battalion
Other details from Roll of Honour Circular'Fought against the Turks, was invalided Home to London - King George Hospital. [After] seven months went back to Salisbury Plain & there volunteered for France to fight the Germans, his Colonel tryed [sic] hard to persuade him not to go to France.' [Details from father]
FateKilled in Action 20 September 1917
Place of death or woundingYpres, Belgium
Age at death30
Age at death from cemetery records30
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
90
Miscellaneous information from
  cemetery records
Parents: Charles and Edith Francis BENNETT, 16 Castle Street, Cirencester, Glos, England. Native of Cirencester
Other details

War service: Egypt, Gallipoli, Western Front

Medals: 1914-15 Star, British War Medal, Victory Medal