Regimental number | 1914 |
Place of birth | Sydney New South Wales |
School | Kiama Superior Public School, NSW |
Previous military service | Served in the Senior Cadets, Kiama, NSW |
Date of enlistment from Nominal Roll | |
Rank from Nominal Roll | Private |
Unit from Nominal Roll | 4th Battalion |
Other details from Roll of Honour Circular | Name given on RoH circular as George Oswald BLAIR, 4th Bn. |
Fate | Killed in Action |
Place of death or wounding | Polygon Wood, Ypres, Belgium |
Date of death | |
Age at death | 25.6 |
Age at death from cemetery records | 25 |
Place of burial | No known grave |
Commemoration details | The Ypres (Menin Gate) Memorial (Panel 7), 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 | 39 |
Miscellaneous information from cemetery records | Parents: James and Katherine BLAIR, Lagoon Road, North Kiama, New South Wales |