The AIF Project

Horace Stewart WINBURN

Regimental number745
Place of birthMathinna, Tasmania
SchoolState School, Longford, Tasmania
Other trainingPhillip Smith Training College, Hobart, Tasmania
ReligionChurch of England
OccupationSchool teacher
AddressLaunceston, Tasmania
Marital statusSingle
Age at embarkation19
Next of kinGrandmother, Mrs Elizabeth Atwater, Longford, Tasmania
Previous military service92nd Infantry
Enlistment date8 October 1915
Rank on enlistmentCorporal
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 Circular'Recommended for gallant conduct during Messines Offensive.' (Details from grandmother, Mrs Elizabeth Atwater.)
FateKilled in Action 13 October 1917
Place of death or woundingPasschendaele, Ypres, Belgium
Age at death21
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
133
Miscellaneous information from
  cemetery records
Parents: Frederick George and Mary WINBURN
Family/military connectionsBrothers: 293 Pte Frederick George WINBURN, 40th Bn, returned to Australia, 15 February 1918; 1052 Pte Wilfred Percy WINBURN, 12th Bn, returned to Australia, 19 April 1919.
Other details

War service: Western Front

Medals: British War Medal, Victory Medal

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