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: Egypt, Western Front

Joined 9th Bn, Tel el Kebir, 7 January 1916.

Proceeded from Alexandria to join the British Expeditionary Force, 27 March 1916; disembarked Marseilles, 3 April 1916. Found guilty, 24 March 1916, of neglecting to obey Routine Orders in that he was absent from Camp without a pass: awarded 48 hours Field Punishment No. 2. Found guilty, 17 October 1916, of drunkenness, 10 October 1916: awarded 21 days' Field Punishment No. 2.

Admitted to 1st Australian Field Ambulance, 1 March 1917, and transferred to Corps Scabies Station (scabies); discharged, 13 March 1917; rejoined Bn, 15 March 1917.

Found guilty by Field General Court Martial, 19 March 1917, of being absent without leave from 1600, 27 January, to 1400, 30 January 1917: awarded 42 days' Field Punishment No. 2; time in confinement awaiting trial: 15-18 March 1917.

Admitted to Corps Scabies Station, 23 March 1917 (scabies); discharged to duty, 31 March 1917; rejoined Bn, 1 April 1917.

Killed in action, Belgium, 8 October 1917.