Ronald Champ BLOM

Regimental number1542
Place of birthKew, Victoria
ReligionChurch of England
OccupationLabourer
AddressRiverswood, Victoria
Marital statusSingle
Age at embarkation18
Next of kinFather, Peter Blom, 21 Auburn Grove, Auburn, Victoria
Previous military serviceServed 3 years in the Mooreland Senior School Cadets.
Enlistment date31 August 1915
Rank on enlistmentPrivate
Unit name8th Light Horse Regiment, 12th Reinforcement
AWM Embarkation Roll number10/13/3
Embarkation detailsUnit embarked from Melbourne, Victoria, on board HMAT A11 Ascanius on 10 November 1915
Rank from Nominal RollGunner
Unit from Nominal Roll22nd Battalion
Other details from Roll of Honour CircularEnlisted 31 August 1915 and posted to 8th Light Horse, 12th Reinforcements, which he joined on 26 December 1915. Transferred to 45th Battery, 12th Field Artillery Brigade, 2 April 1916; and to the 22nd Bn, 7 September 1917.
FateKilled in Action 4 October 1917
Place of death or woundingBroodseinde, Passchendaele, Belgium
Age at death20
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
95
Other details

War service: Egypt, Western Front

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