Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

Tom Hamilton was born at Indooroopilly in Brisbane, the son of Stewart and Mary Hamilton. He attended North Pine State School (now Petrie) before his family moved to the Coalstoun Lakes district.
Tom presented himself for enlistment to the recruiting depot in Maryborough on 3rd October 1916 at a time when community feelings were running hot over the first conscription plebiscite. He reported his age as 33 years and stated his occupation as farmer. Tom named his father, Stuart, as his next of kin.
After spending some time in a depot battalion at Enoggera, Tom was allocated as a reinforcement for the 25th Battalion, a Queensland battalion that was part of the 7th Infantry Brigade of the 2nd Division AIF.
The 130 men who made up the 19th reinforcements for the 25th battalion travelled to Sydney by train under the charge of two 2nd Lieutenants where they boarded the transport “Wiltshire” on 7th February 1917. After two months at sea, Tom and the rest of the reinforcements disembarked in Plymouth and travelled by train to the 7th Brigade Training Battalion at Rollestone on Salisbury Plain. There was no immediate need for reinforcements at the front between May and August and so the reinforcements remained in England.
On 17th October, Tom received orders to proceed overseas via Southampton. A week later Tom was taken on strength by the 25th. The British offensive of 1917 was centred around the Ypres salient in Belgian Flanders. The objective was to move east from the city of Ypres by a series of “bite and hold” engagements towards a ridge which contained the villages of Broodseinde, Zonnebeke and Passchendaele. The entire 7thBrigade had been engaged in the battle of Menin Road in September and then in the battle of Broodseinde Ridge in early October. When Tom joined his battalion, it was in the rear areas preparing to go back into the line.
Tom was placed into a platoon when he arrived at the 25th Battalion billets on 24th October. Two days later, the battalion loaded onto buses for a journey to the ramparts of the city wall at Ypres where they billeted for the night before commencing a march along the Menin Road towards the Passchendaele Ridge. Up until the second week in October, the battles of the Ypres campaign had been one success after another; but all that changed when it began to rain turning the battlefield into a sea of clawing, stinking mud. The conditions were compounded by incessant enemy artillery firing high explosive and mustard gas.
There is no record of the manner of Tom Hamilton’s death on the 27th October but given the location of his burial, it most likely that he was killed by an artillery shell not far along the Menin Road from Ypres as his battalion slogged through the mud to relieve another battalion in front of Passchendaele. Tom was buried in a temporary grave with a wooden marker.
At the war’s end, the Imperial War Graves Commission began the task of locating isolated graves and consolidating them into larger permanent cemeteries. Tom Hamilton’s remains were exhumed and he was permanently laid to rest in the Hooge Crater Cemetery on the Menin Road 2 kilometres east of the Menin Gate in Ypres. By the time that war medals were being distributed, Tom’s mother had died and his father had moved back to the Pine Rivers district at Lawnton.