The AIF Project

John Ernest Pushman BOWRING

Regimental number548
Place of birthHawthorn, Victoria
SchoolGeelong College, Victoria
ReligionMethodist
OccupationDraper
AddressLatrobe, Tasmania
Marital statusMarried
Age at embarkation39
Next of kinWife, Mrs Margaret Marcella Bowring, Latrobe, Tasmania
Previous military serviceServed in the South African War with the New South Wales Mounted Rifles.
Enlistment date13 March 1916
Rank on enlistmentSergeant
Unit name40th Battalion, C Company
AWM Embarkation Roll number23/57/1
Embarkation detailsUnit embarked from Hobart, Tasmania, on board HMAT A35 Berrima on 1 July 1916
Rank from Nominal RollSergeant
Unit from Nominal Roll40th Battalion
Other details from Roll of Honour CircularAwarded the Queen's Medal with four Bars.
FateKilled in Action 7 June 1917
Place of death or woundingMessines, Belgium
Age at death41
Age at death from cemetery records41
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
158
Miscellaneous information from
  cemetery records
Parents: John and Minnie BOWRING; husband of Margaret BOWRING, Latrobe, Tasmania
Other details

War service: Western Front

Medals: British War Medal, Victory Medal

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