Regimental number 2277
Religion Presbyterian
Occupation Shepherd
Address Launceston, Tasmania
Marital status Married
Age at embarkation 43
Next of kin Wife, Mrs Grace Mary Wright, 'Leipzig', Avoca, Tasmania
Enlistment date 2 May 1916
Rank on enlistment Private
Unit name 40th Battalion, 4th Reinforcement
AWM Embarkation Roll number 23/57/2
Embarkation details Unit embarked from Melbourne, Victoria, on board HMAT A16 Port Melbourne on 21 October 1916
Regimental number from Nominal Roll 2277B
Rank from Nominal Roll Private
Unit from Nominal Roll 12th Battalion
Fate Killed in Action 6 October 1917
Age at death from cemetery records 44
Place of burial No known grave
Commemoration details The Ypres (Menin Gate) Memorial, 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 68
Miscellaneous information from cemetery records Parents: James and Annie WRIGHT
Other details
War service: Western Front
Medals: British War Medal, Victory Medal