The AIF Project

Lindsay STEPHENS

Regimental number3639
Place of birthMoonee Ponds, Victoria
SchoolAshby State School, Geelong West, Victoria
ReligionPresbyterian
OccupationLabourer
Addressc/o Mother, Mrs Fanny Stephens, 94 Upper Hope Street, West Geelong, Victoria
Marital statusSingle
Age at embarkation21
Next of kinFather, Charles Stephens, Melperinka, Boyne Avenue, East Geelong, Victoria
Enlistment date13 July 1915
Date of enlistment from Nominal Roll8 July 1915
Rank on enlistmentPrivate
Unit name22nd Battalion, 8th Reinforcement
AWM Embarkation Roll number23/39/2
Embarkation detailsUnit embarked from Melbourne, Victoria, on board HMAT A19 Afric on 5 January 1916
Rank from Nominal RollPrivate
Unit from Nominal Roll58th Battalion
FateKilled in Action 12 October 1917
Place of death or woundingFrance
Age at death22.6
Age at death from cemetery records22
Place of burialNo known grave
Commemoration detailsThe Ypres (Menin Gate) Memorial (Panel 29), 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
166
Miscellaneous information from
  cemetery records
Parents: Charles and Fanny Christinia STEPHENS, 'Lindon', West Melbourne Road, Geelong West, Victoria. Native of Moonee Ponds, Melbourne, Victoria
Family/military connectionsBrothers: 503 Pte William George STEPHENS, 24th Bn, returned to Australia, 24 January 1919; 2020 Gunner Norman STEPHENS MSM, 4th Trench Mortar Battery, returned to Australia, 5 April 1919.
Other details

War service: Western Front

Medals: British War Medal, Victory Medal

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