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.

War service: Western Front

Embarked Sydney, 9 November 1916; disembarked Devonport, England, 9 January 1917.

Proceeded overseas to France from 1st Training Bn, Larkhill, 3 May 1917; taken on strength, 3rd Bn, in the field, 21 May 1917.

Admitted to 3rd Field Ambulance, 20 June 1917 (albuminuria), and transferred to 1st Divisional Rest Station; rejoined Bn, in the field, 6 July 1917.

Wounded in action, Belgium, 21 September 1917.

Previously reported Wounded in action, now, 16 November 1917, reported Wounded and Missing.Fatre subsequently ruled as 'Killed in Action, 21 September 1917'.

Medals: British War Medal, Victory Medal

Father uncontactable; medals allotted to mother.

Mother chose as inscription on a headstone: 'Just when his life was brightest/Just when his hopes were best/His country called and he answered/now somewhere in Belgium he rests.' Base Records pointed out, 9 March 1922, that the inscription the maximum of 66 letters, including spaces. The inscription was subsequently amended to include only the last line. When no grave could be found, the proposed inscription was rendered redundant because there was no headstone.