Leonard Frederick BYSH

Regimental number897
Date of birth20 August 1887
Place of birthOld Bushey, Hertfordshire, England
SchoolBoard School, Hertfordshire, England
Age on arrival in Australia22
ReligionProtestant
OccupationLabourer
Address36 Peel Street, Jolimont, Subiaco, Western Australia
Marital statusSingle
Age at embarkation27
Next of kinFather, James Bysh, 36 Peel Street, Jolimont, Subiaco, Western Australia
Enlistment date17 January 1916
Rank on enlistmentPrivate
Unit name44th Battalion Machine Gun Section
Embarkation detailsUnit embarked from Fremantle, Western Australia, on board HMAT A29 Suevic on 6 June 1916
Rank from Nominal RollSergeant
Unit from Nominal Roll44th Battalion
Recommendations (Medals and Awards)

Mention in Corps Orders


Recommendation date: 3 August 1917

FateKilled in Action 4 October 1917
Place of death or woundingZonnebeke, Belgium
Age at death31
Age at death from cemetery records31
Place of burialNo known grave
Commemoration detailsThe Ypres (Menin Gate) Memorial (Panel 27), 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
137
Miscellaneous information from
  cemetery records
Parents: James and Amelia BYSH, 'Broxbourne', Shaftesbury Road, Burwood, New South Wales
Family/military connectionsBrother-in-law: 3012 Pte Gordon Walter BONE, 44th Bn, died of disease, 28 October 1918.
Other details

War service: Western Front

Medals: British War Medal, Victory Medal