The Story of the Unknown Warrior

November 7th 2020

They buried him among the kings because he had done good toward God and toward His house.

It was decided early in the Great War that there would be no repatriation of those killed in action. They would lie where they fell, many never to be identified.

The Rev David Railton MC, padre to the 19^th (County of London) Battalion of the London Regiment, had served throughout the war, bringing what comfort he could to those in the line. He had seen his fair share of the grim harvest of the war. But in 1916, an incident near Armentières struck him particularly.

David Railton

He came across a grave with a wooden cross with the words "An unknown British soldier of the Black Watch" carved on the rough wood.

How that grave caused me to think! … But, who was he, and who were his folk? Was he just a laddie? There was no answer to those questions, nor has there ever been yet. So I thought and thought … What can I do to ease the pain of father, mother, brother, sister, sweetheart, wife and friend? Quietly and gradually there came out of the mist of thought this answer clear and strong. Let this body - this symbol of him - be carried reverently over the sea to his native land. And I was happy for about five or ten minutes.

The war ended. In June 1919, the Treaty of Versailles was signed. The Prime Minister approved the idea of a Victory Parade through the streets of London. A proposal had been made that a temporary structure be erected in Whitehall as a focal point of the parade. Edwin Lutyens was tasked with its design.

A wooden structure was erected on the 18^th July 1919, the eve of the Victory Parade. People began immediately to lay flowers and wreaths around its base. This continued all day, pausing only for its official unveiling and the passing of the parade. Indeed, despite the cold, and the heavy and unrelenting rain, thousands of mothers, fathers, widows and children continued with their floral tributes to the fallen well into the night.

Service at the Cenotaph, 1919

After the parade, thought was given to a permanent structure. A focus for an annual remembrance parade. Lutyens was again asked to design this new symbol of remembrance.

After the war, Railton had continued his ministry, this time in the more peaceful surroundings of Margate. His memories of that anonymous soldier still haunted his thoughts. In the summer of 1920, he wrote to the Dean of Westminster, and outlined his idea. That a individual soldier, anonymous, should be returned from France and serve as a focus for a nation’s loss. Railton heard nothing, until the 19^th October. But things had been progressing at the highest political levels.

So it was that on the 7^th November 1920, twelve men equipped with shovels and sacks arrived at various cemeteries in the four main areas of the Western Front: Aisne, Arras, the Somme, and Ypres.

As ordered, they took great care to locate a body that was unidentifiable, save for the fact that the corpse must belong to a British or Commonwealth sailor, soldier, or airman. Using scraps of cloth and tattered remnants of uniform and equipment, four such bodies were found and identified as being from Britain or the Commonwealth. Being not much more than bones, each was scooped into the sacks.

The bodies were driven to St Pol-sur-Ternoise, some twenty miles west of Arras, which was the GHQ of Brigadier General Wyatt, OC British troops in France. After the bodies had been verified as being British or Commonwealth, each was covered with a Union Flag. The men whose grisly task it had been to exhume the bodies were immediately returned to their units.

At midnight, Wyatt was tasked with selecting one of the corpses. The selected man was placed immediately into a pine coffin which was sealed. The remaining three corpses were taken out for reburial. To ensure secrecy, the bodies were placed in a shell hole on the road to Albert, and after a brief prayer, covered over.

The next morning, an ambulance transferred the selected soldier, the Unknown Warrior, to Boulogne. Eight soldiers from various regiments, transferred the coffin to a temporary chapel in Boulogne Castle. There he rested.

On the 10^th November, 16 barrels of French soil from the Ypres salient was transferred to a warship and began its journey to Westminster Abbey. The soil would be used in the tomb to ensure that the Unknown Warrior might lie beneath the soil so many gave their lives to defend.

Later that morning, two undertakers arrived in the chapel and placed the unopened, rough pine coffin into a casket of English oak, the planks for which had come from Hampton Court. A plate of beaten iron affixed to the top of the 200lb coffin read “A British Warrior who fell in the Great War 1914-18 for King and Country”. Bolted to the lid, a medieval “Crusader’s sword” from the King’s royal collection.

The Oak Casket (c) Imperial War Museum

When all was ready, the oak casket was transported to the quayside, followed by thousands of school children, and a seemingly endless parade of cavalry and infantry.

Quayside in Boulogne

The White Ensign on HMS Verdun was lowered to half mast, and with Marshal Ferdinand Foch’s words echoing in the streets of Boulogne, the casket was piped aboard to be laid on the quarterdeck.

HMS Verdun

Six destroyers accompanied Verdun on its short journey across the channel. Arriving in Dover shortly after noon, the casket was transferred to a special train carriage, and thence to London’s Victoria Station, arriving around 8pm. There it remained, guarded overnight by men of the 1^st Battalion, Grenadier Guards.

At 9:20am, 11^th November 1920, men of that battalion draped the casket with David Railton’s Union Flag which he had used as an altar cloth throughout the war. The flag hangs to this day in Westminster Abbey. Placed on top were sidearms, a Brodie helmet and a webbing belt.

Railton’s flag in Westminster Abbey

A battery of nineteen guns fired a salute in Hyde Park. As the guns' rumble faded, transferred now to a gun carriage, the Unknown Warrior began his final journey. As the cortège passed through the streets of London, only the sound of the horses’ hooves and the tramp of the soldiers’ feet broke the silence. It took fully ten minutes for the entire cortège to pass.

Finally, the gun carriage was brought to a halt at the Cenotaph.

The cortège arrives

The massed bands struck up, and then the Lord’s Prayer was said. There followed a silence, and then the steady strike of Big Ben. At the first stroke, the King touched a button, releasing the flags that shrouded the Cenotaph.

Unveiling of the Cenotaph, 1920

As the eleventh stroke faded, there came a deep silence across London. The gun carriage then began the final stage of its journey to Westminster Abbey. There, NCOs of the Coldstream Guards transferred the draped casket into the Abbey where it was laid on bars across the open grave. The King took his place at the head of the grave.

Amongst those watching in the Abbey was a small group of around one hundred women; widows who had lost not only their husbands, but all their sons.

After a brief service, the pallbearers removed the Union Flag and carefully lowered the casket into the grave.

The congregation sang Abide with Me. There then followed drums, the Last Post, and then silence. Finally, the band of the Grenadier Guards struck up and, after the King, the rest of the invited guests began to file out of the Abbey.

The Victory Parade of 1919

Meanwhile, as soon as the ceremony at the Cenotaph had finished, crowds had begun to lay their floral tributes and wreaths at its base. Then a queue four feet deep formed from Whitehall to Westminster Abbey as people waited to pay tribute at the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior. More than 40,000 were successful that first day, and still tens of thousands were waiting their turn when the doors to the Abbey were closed at 11pm.

Crowds continued to visit both the Cenotaph and the Tomb throughout the rest of the week. By Monday the 15^th November, it was estimated that over one and a half million had filed past the Cenotaph, and over half a million people had visited the Tomb.

Saturday had been set aside as the children’s day. Little ones, some so young they never knew their fathers, passed by the foot of the Cenotaph.

One such, on seeing the mass of flowers now reaching ten feet high around all sides of the base, was heard to remark: