Clement William Beecroft

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      Sex: M

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Individual Information

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          Birth: 
    Christening: 5 Jun 1881 - Fremantle, Western Australia, Australia 1
          Death: 13 Oct 1917 - France
         Burial: 
 Cause of Death: killed in action, WW I
           AFN : 
                 

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Events

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• Military, No 1 Mining Corps, 2 Nov 1915

Regimental number744
SchoolFremantle Boys' School, Western Australia
ReligionChurch of England
Address56 Short Street, Perth, Western Australia
Marital statusSingle
Age at embarkation32
Next of kinMother, Mrs Jane Beecroft, 56 Short Street, Perth, Western Australia
Enlistment date2 November 1915
Date of enlistment from Nominal Roll27 November 1915
Rank on enlistmentSapper
Unit nameNo 1 Mining Corps
Embarkation detailsUnit embarked from Sydney, New South Wales, on board HMAT A38 Ulysses on 20 February 1916
Rank from Nominal RollPrivate
Unit from Nominal Roll40th Battalion
FateKilled in Action 13 October 1917
Place of death or woundingPasschendaele, Ypres, Belgium
Age at death37
Place of burialNo known grave
Commemoration detailsThe Ypres (Menin Gate) Memorial (Panel 25), 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 Memorial132
Miscellaneous information from
cemetery recordsParents: Clement Simpson and Jane BEECROFT. Native of Perth, Western Australia
Other details

War service: Western Front

Medals: British War Medal, Victory Medal

• Obituary, The West Australian (Perth, WA), 25 Jun 1918

BEECROFT. - Killed in action, somewhere in France, on October 13, 1917, previously reported missing. Tunneller William C. Beecroft, second son of Mrs. C. Beecroft, of 56 Short-street, Perth, aged 36 years.
- Inserted by his sorrowing mother, brothers, and sisters.

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Parents

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         Father: Clement Simpson Beecroft
         Mother: Jane F Moon 1

Sources

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1. LDS - IGI Index (familysearch.org).

1 LDS - IGI Index (familysearch.org).