Menin Gate Memorial Ypres Flanders |
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The Menin Gate Memorial is at the eastern exit of the town of Ypres ("Ieper" in Flemish) in Flanders, Belgium. The Menin Gate Memorial, opened on 24 July 1927, was Designed by Sir Reginald Blomfield and was dedicated to missing British and Commonwealth soldiers who were killed in one of the Battles of Ypres which took place around the Ypres Salient area and who have no known grave. The Menin Gate memorial marks the starting point for one of the main roads out of the town that led Allied soldiers to the front line during World War I. Its large Hall of Memory (huge panels inside and out) contains the names of 54,896 Commonwealth soldiers who died without graves. On completion of the Menin Gate memorial, it was discovered to be too small to contain all the names as originally planned. The names recorded on the gate's panels are those of men who died in the area between the outbreak of the war in 1914 and 15th August, 1917. The names of a further 34,984 of the missing, those who died between 16th August, 1917 and the end of the war, are recorded on carved panels at Tyne Cot Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery and Memorial to the Missing, on the slopes just below Passchendaele. At the inauguration ceremony on July 24th 1927, the buglers of the Somerset Light Infantry sounded the ‘Last Post’. Since then, every evening at 8.00pm, buglers from the local fire brigade close the road which passes under the Memorial and sound the Last Post. The only time this was not done was during the German occupation of Belgium in World War Two when the daily ceremony was conducted at Brookwood Military Cemetery, in Surrey, England. It was restarted the very evening that Polish forces liberated Ypres in the Second War from the Germans.
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