Place | Europe: France, Picardie, Somme, Bapaume Cambrai Area, Lagnicourt |
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Accession Number | REL/18685.001 |
Collection type | Heraldry |
Object type | Heraldry |
Physical description | Bronze |
Date made | c 1921 |
Conflict |
First World War, 1914-1918 |
Next of kin plaque : Orderly Sergeant Arthur Gladstone Ansett, 14th Battalion, AIF
Bronze next of kin plaque, showing on the obverse, Britannia holding a laurel wreath, the British lion, dolphins, a spray of oak leaves and the words 'HE DIED FOR FREEDOM AND HONOUR' around the edge. Beneath the main figures, the British lion defeats the German eagle. The initials 'ECP', for the designer Edward Carter Preston appear above the lion's right forepaw. A raised rectangle above the lion's head bears the name 'ARTHUR GLADSTONE ANSETT'.
Born in Melbourne in 1891, Arthur Gladstone Ansett was employed as a warehouse assistant when he enlisted in the AIF on 12 July 1915. Posted as a private, service number 3229, to the 11th Reinforcements for the 14th Battalion, he left Melbourne for overseas service aboard HMAT A71 Nestor on 11 October. Ansett joined C Company of the battalion in Egypt in March 1916 and was promoted to lance corporal shortly afterwards.
The battalion arrived in France, for service on the Western Front, in June 1916. Ansett was wounded in the ankle during a bombing raid Mouquet Farm on 27 August. Promoted corporal at the beginning of September, he did not rejoin his unit until November. At the end of the year he was promoted to sergeant and appointed the battalion's Orderly Room Clerk.
Ansett had undertaken officer training and was about to be commissioned when he was killed on 7 April 1917, aged 25, at Vraucourt Copse, near Lagnicourt, while moving into line to prepare for an attack on the Hindenburg Line. Buried where he had fallen his body could not be located after the war and his name is commemorated on the Villers- Bretonneux Memorial.
Ansett's mother had died in 1915, and his father, his nominated next of kin, in 1919. This memorial plaque was issued to his brother, Charles John Ansett, who had also served in the war, in March 1922.