The AIF Project

Keith Garraway CHATFIELD

Regimental number332
Place of birthRyde, New South Wales
SchoolFort Street High School, Sydney, New South Wales
ReligionChurch of England
OccupationArticled pupil surveying
AddressRyde, New South Wales
Marital statusSingle
Age at embarkation20
Next of kinFather, Percy Chatfield, North Road, Ryde, New South Wales
Previous military serviceServed in Royal Australian Engineers, Citizen Military Forces.
Enlistment date13 April 1916
Rank on enlistmentPrivate
Unit nameDivisional Cyclist Company 3, Reinforcement 1
AWM Embarkation Roll number12/6/1
Embarkation detailsUnit embarked from Sydney, New South Wales, on board HMAT A64 Demosthenes on 18 May 1916
Rank from Nominal RollPrivate
Unit from Nominal Roll1st Battalion
FateKilled in Action 3 October 1917
Place of death or woundingBroodseinde, Belgium
Age at death from cemetery records22
Place of burialNo known grave
Commemoration detailsThe Ypres (Menin Gate) Memorial, 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
28
Miscellaneous information from
  cemetery records
Commemorated (brass plaque) in St Anne's Anglican Church, Ryde, New South Wales. Parents: Percy Garraway and Amelia E. CHATFIELD
Family/military connectionsCousin: [225] Lt Charles Francis ELLIOTT MC, 3rd Bn, returned to Australia, 26 October 1918.

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