The AIF Project

Enlisted Aug 17th 1914. Left Sydney with the 1st Infantry Brigade 1914 for Egypt on active service. Left Egypt and was at the first landing of AIF at the Dardanelles on 25th April 1915; was severely wounded; returned to active service 1915; sailed for Egypt, then sent to Western Front and served in France and Belgium. Was slightly wounded in 1916 and was killed at Broodseinde Ridge on Oct 4th 1917 near Ypres after seeing and going through some very heavy fighting.

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, Gallipoli, Western Front

Embarked from Alexandria to join the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, Gallipoli, 5 April 1915.

Wounded in action, 25 April 1915 (gun shot wound, wrist, slight); admitted to 17th General Hospital, Alexandria, 30 April 1915; embarked for England, 2 June 1915. Rejoined Bn, Tel el Kebir, Egypt, 15 January 1916.

Embarked from Alexandria to join the British Expeditionary Force, 23 March 1916; disembarked Marseilles, 30 March 1916.

Admitted to 1st Divisional Rest Station, 6 June 1916 (influenza); rejoined unit, 25 June 1916.

Wounded in action; rejoined unit, 25 June 1916.

Appointed Lance Corporal, 29 October 1916.

Detached for duty with Anzac Saw Mills, 4 February 1917; rejoined unit, 15 July 1917.

Killed in action, Belgium, 4 October 1917.