The AIF Project

Donald Eric BLACKHALL

Regimental number427
Place of birthHastings, Tasmania
SchoolState School, Tasmania
ReligionChurch of England
OccupationLabourer
AddressHastings, Tasmania
Marital statusSingle
Age at embarkation21
Next of kinFather, S. Blackhall, same address
Previous military serviceServed in the Cadets.
Enlistment date11 March 1916
Date of enlistment from Nominal Roll13 March 1916
Rank on enlistmentPrivate
Unit nameAnzac Cyclist Battalion, Reinforcement 3
AWM Embarkation Roll number12/1/3
Embarkation detailsUnit embarked from Sydney, New South Wales, on board HMAT A18 Wiltshire on 22 August 1916
Rank from Nominal RollPrivate
Unit from Nominal Roll17th Machine Gun Company
FateKilled in Action 17 October 1917
Place of death or woundingPasschendaele, Ypres, Belgium
Age at death21
Age at death from cemetery records22
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
177
Miscellaneous information from
  cemetery records
Parents: Samuel Thomas and Mary Ann BLACKHALL, Hastings, Tasmania
Family/military connectionsBrothers: 33499 Driver Arthur John BLACKHALL, 6th Field Artillery Brigade, returned to Australia, 28 August 1919; 17418 Driver William Leslie BLACKHALL, 3rd Field Company Engineers, returned to Australia, 6 September 1919.
Other details

War service: Western Front

Medals: British War Medal, Victory Medal

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