The AIF Project

William Henry SEARLE

Regimental number996
Place of birthInvergordon, Victoria
SchoolNorth Prentice State School, Victoria
ReligionChurch of England
OccupationBaker
AddressNorth Prentice, Rutherglen, Victoria
Marital statusSingle
Age at embarkation22
Next of kinFather, James Searle, North Prentice, Rutherglen, Victoria
Enlistment date19 February 1916
Date of enlistment from Nominal Roll25 February 1916
Rank on enlistmentPrivate
Unit name37th Battalion, C Company
AWM Embarkation Roll number23/54/1
Embarkation detailsUnit embarked from Melbourne, Victoria, on board HMAT A34 Persic on 3 June 1916
Rank from Nominal RollLance Corporal
Unit from Nominal Roll37th Battalion
FateKilled in Action 12 October 1917
Place of death or woundingPasschendaele, Ypres, Belgium
Age at death23
Age at death from cemetery records23
Place of burialNo known grave
Commemoration detailsThe Ypres (Menin Gate) Memorial (Panel 25), 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
129
Miscellaneous information from
  cemetery records
Parents: James and Agnes SEARLE, North Prentice, Rutherglen, Victoria. Native of Rutherglen
Family/military connectionsCousins: 3837 Sergeant Edwin Ernest EDDY, 57th Bn, returned to Australia (an invalid), 30 June 1918, died in a military hospital in Melbourne, 31 July 1919; 1710 Driver Percy EDDY, 6th Field Artillery Brigade, returned to Australia, 29 May 1919; 6345 Pte James Francis GILBERT, 22nd Bn, returned to Australia, 22 December 1918.
Other details

War service: Western Front

Medals: British War Medal, Victory Medal

Print format    


© The AIF Project 2024, UNSW Canberra. Not to be reproduced without permission.