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

Transferred to 47th Bn, Tel el Kebir, 5 May 1916.

Embarked Alexandria to join the British Expeditionary Force, 7 June 1916; disembarked Marseilles, France, 14 June 1916.

Admitted to 26th General Hospital, Etaples, 6 July 1916 (haemoptysis); listed as 'dangerously ill', 11 July 1916; transferred to England, 23 July 1916, and admitted to York Military Hospital, 24 July 1916; transferred to No 1 Auxiliary Hospital, Harefield, 23 August 1916; marched out to No 1 Command Depot, Perham Downs, 28 August 1916; granted furlough, 29 August 1916.

Marched out to No 3 Command Depot, Bovington, 13 October 1916.

Marched out to No 4 Command Depot, Wareham, 3 November 1916.

Found guilty, 6 December 1916, of being absent without leave from Tattoo, 19 November, until apprehended in London at 2.35 pm, 29 November 1916: awarded 10 days' detention, and forfeited 21 days' pay.

Admitted to Detention Barracks, 6 December 1916; time expired, 15 December 1916.

Transferred to 69th Bn, 23 March 1917.

Admitted to 1st Australian Dermatological Hospital, Bulford, 19 April 1917; discharged, 16 June 1917; total period of treatment for venereal disease: 60 days.

Marched in to No 4 Command Depot, Wareham, 16 June 1917.

Proceeded overseas to France, 26 July 1917; rejoined 47th Bn, in the field, 14 August 1917.

Killed in action, Belgium, 12 October 1917.

Buried 1000 yards SW of Passchendaele and 1000 yards NE of Zonnebeke; grave subsquently lost.