The AIF Project

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.

War service: Western Front

Embarked Sydney, 3 June 1916; disembarked Plymouth, England, 3 August 1916.

Proceeded overseas to France, 22 September 1916; marched into 1st Australian Division Base Depot, Etaples, 24 September 1916; marched out to join unit, 4 October 1916; taken on strength, 4th Bn, 5 October 1916.

Admitted to 10th Stationary Hospital, St Omer, 18 October 1916 (not yet diagnosed); invalided to England, 5 November 1916 (fractured left fibula); admitted to County of Middlesex Hospital, England, 8 November 1916; transferred to 1st Auxiliary Hospital, 20 November 1916; discharged, 23 November 1916; marched into No 2 Command Depot, Weymouth, 23 November 1916.

marched into No 4 Command Depot, 16 December 1916.

Transferred to 61st Bn, 23 March 1917.

Proceeded overseas to France, 12 September 1917; marched into 1st Australian Division Base Depot, Havre, 13 September 1917; marched out to unit, 21 September 1917; taken on strength, 4th Bn, 25 September 1917.

Wounded in action, Belgium, 4 October 1917; reported wounded and missing, 4 October 1917; subsequent Court of Enquiry held on 16 March 1918 determined that he was killed in action, Belgium, 4 October 1917. [No. 2612 Sergeant G.E. HANLEY gave evidence that he saw a shell burst in front of Pte COTTER at 6.30 am, 4 October 1917, at Anzac Ridge in the Ypres Sector. He stated that he saw COTTER fall, and went over to him and saw that his leg had been blown off at the hip].