Darge Photographic Company collection of negatives

Studio portrait of 538 Private (Pte) William Alfred Fitch, 29th Battalion. A carpenter from Brighton, Vic prior to enlistment, Pte Fitch enlisted embarked with B Company from Melbourne aboard HMAT Ascanius on 10 November 1915. Later transferring to the 5th Divisional Signal Company, he was originally listed as missing in action. A later Court of Enquiry found that he had been killed in action on 25 September 1917 at Polygon Wood, Belgium, aged 21. He is commemorated on the Menin Gate Memorial. This is one of a series of photographs taken by the Darge Photographic Company which had the concession to take photographs at the Broadmeadows and Seymour army camps during the First World War. In the 1930s, the Australian War Memorial purchased the original glass negatives from Algernon Darge, along with the photographers' notebooks. The notebooks contain brief details, usually a surname or unit name, for each negative.