Henry Arthur BURLEY

Regimental number429
Date of birth5 January 1897
Place of birthSouth Brisbane, Queensland
SchoolEagle Junction State School
Other trainingTraining as a draughtsman at evening classes; Apprentice to Building Trade.
ReligionChurch of England
OccupationCarpenter
AddressLiverpool Street, Clayfield, Queensland
Marital statusSingle
Age at embarkation19
Next of kinFather, J H Burley, Liverpool Street, Clayfield, Queensland
Previous military serviceTrained in the Cadets
Enlistment date13 May 1916
Rank on enlistmentPrivate
Unit nameMachine Gun Company 3, Reinforcement 6
AWM Embarkation Roll number24/8/3
Embarkation detailsUnit embarked from Melbourne, Victoria, on board HMAT A17 Port Lincoln on 20 October 1916
FateKilled in Action 20 September 1917
Place of death or woundingPolygon Wood, near Hooge
Age at death from cemetery records20
Place of burialNo known grave
Commemoration detailsThe Ypres (Menin Gate) Memorial (Panel 31), 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
177
Miscellaneous information from
  cemetery records
Parents: John and S.M. BURLEY, Liverpool Road, Clayfield, Queensland
Family/military connectionsFuture Brother-in-law: 3222 Private Thomas Allingham ROCHE, 52nd Battalion, 8th Reinforcement.
Other details

War service: Western Front

Medals: British War Medal, Victory Medal