The AIF Project

Unspecified

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: Western Front

Statement, Red Cross File No 1830414L, 2453 Pte P.E. McIlwraith, D Company, 45th Bn (patient, Georges Heights Military Hospital, Mosman, New South Wales), 6 November 1918: 'Informant described Morrison as about 6 feet high, slight build, fair complexion, aged about 28/29. Informant states that they both belonged to D Company. On 10/10/17 the Battalion was at Passchendaele holding the support lines. at about 9 a.m. while a party including Morrison and Informant were sitting in a trench a shell fell right amongst them and killed Morrison and another soldier named Cecil Morgan outright. Two others of the party were wounded. Informant was almost rubbing shoulders with Morrison, yet emerged unhurt although he was buried as a result of the explosion. Informant helped to bury Morrison and Morgan in the one grave near where they fell. They made a rough cross on which they penciled the names of the two men with indelible pencil and put it on the grave. According to Informant Morrison was well liked by his mates.'

Second statement, 3077 Sergeant W.A.KERR, D Company, 45th Bn, 7 May 1918: 'It was at Zonnibeke (sic) that George Morrison was killed. He was a long tall chapwith hair betwixt and between. We called him "Snakey". A shell wiped him out at about 11 o'clock on the morning of Oct. 10th. It blew half his head off. I was very close, about 5 yards away and it made me shiver. We buried him there and then at Zonnibeke (sic) and I put a cross on his grave.'