The AIF Project

William Edward BRUDERLIN

Regimental number22
Place of birthAberdeen, Durham
ReligionChurch of England
OccupationRailway cleaner
AddressChurch Street, Singleton, New South Wales
Marital statusSingle
Age at embarkation19
Next of kinMother, Mrs W Bruderlin, Church Street, Singleton, New South Wales
Enlistment date21 August 1914
Place of enlistmentRandwick, New South Wales
Rank on enlistmentPrivate
Unit name2nd Battalion, A Company
AWM Embarkation Roll number23/19/1
Embarkation detailsUnit embarked from Sydney, New South Wales, on board HMAT A23 Suffolk on 18 October 1914
Rank from Nominal RollPrivate
Unit from Nominal Roll2nd Battalion
Other details from Roll of Honour CircularEnlisted 21 August 1914. Wounded at Pozieres, France, 24 July 1916.
FateKilled in Action 20 September 1917
Place of death or woundingMenin Road, Ypres, Belgium
Date of death20 September 1917
Age at death22
Place of burialNo known grave
Commemoration detailsThe Ypres (Menin Gate) Memorial (Panel 7), 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
31
Family/military connectionsCousin: 2207 Pte Arthur John BRUDERLIN, 8th Machine Gun Company, killed in action, Zonnebeke, Belgium, 4 October 1917.

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