As well as being the 100 year anniversary of Armistice, today also marks the 88th anniversary of the interring of the unknown soldier. Click below to read a magazine article we did about this very symbolic event that occurred in 1920.
The Unknown Soldier : Text only version
June 7th – 1917 – The Battle of Messines opens with the British Army detonating 19 ammonal mines under the German lines. This still remains the deadliest non-nuclear explosion in history causing the deaths of an estimated 10,000 soldiers. Given that the estimated death toll of military personnel varies between 8 – 12 million, it is unlikely that there will ever be an accurate record of all of the fatalities. Medical personnel treated the injured indiscriminately, but often the severity of injuries and a language barrier would mean that soldiers who died would only be identifiable by the uniforms that they were wearing.
The idea of a Tomb of the Unknown Warrior was first conceived in 1916 by the Reverend David Railton while he was serving as an army chaplain on the Western Front. He saw a number of graves marked with rough crosses that bore the simple, pencil-written legend “An Unknown British Soldier.” In 1920 he proposed that an unidentified British soldier from the battlefields of France be buried with due ceremony in Westminster Abbey ‘among the kings’ to represent the hundreds of thousands of soldiers that had given up their lives for the British Empire.
With strong support by the Dean of Westminster and Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, arrangements were placed in the hands of Lord Curzon of Kedleston. Suitable remains were exhumed from various battlefields and were brought to the chapel at
Saint-Pol-sur-Ternoise near Arras, France on the 7th November 1920. The bodies were received by the Reverend George Kendall OBE, Brigadier L.J. Wyatt and by Lieutenant Colonel E.A.S. Gell. It was the solemn duty of Gell, as the director of Graves Registration, to enter the chapel and prepare the six bodies. He entered the chapel with two officers. They placed each set of remains into one of six identical, plain coffins. Each coffin was draped with a Union flag. None of the trio even knew which bodies had come from which battlefields. Brigadier Wyatt, with eyes closed, rested his hand on one of the coffins. The other soldiers were taken away for reburial by Kendall.
The chosen body stayed at the chapel overnight before being transferred under guard to the ancient citadel at Boulogne, where it was guarded overnight by a company of the French 8th Infantry Regiment. The following morning, two undertakers placed the coffin in a casket made of the timber of Oak trees from Hampton Court Palace. The casket was banded with iron and a crusader’s sword, chosen personally by King George V from the Royal armoury, was affixed to the top. The casket was then surmounted with a shield that bore the inscription:
“A British Warrior who fell
in the Great War 1914 – 1918
for King and Country.”
The journey of the casket as it was transported back to England was marked by numerous processions and vigils, with tens of thousands of French citizens, from every level of society turning out to pay their respects. The casket arrived in England and spent the night of 10th November 1920 at Victoria Station. On the 11th November 1920, the casket was laid on a gun carriage and led through the streets of London. At the newly unveiled Cenotaph the cortege was joined by the King, the Royal Family and the main dignitaries of state as the procession made its way past silent thousands to Westminster Abbey. The casket was borne into the abbey flanked by a guard of honour of 100 Victoria Cross recipients. The guests of honour were 100 women who had each lost their husbands and all of their sons. The coffin was interred in soil brought from each of the six battlefields and covered with a silk pall. The grave was then covered with a black Belgian marble stone – the only tombstone in the Abbey on which it is forbidden to walk. The inscription, composed by Herbert Edward Ryle, Dean of Westminster, was engraved and filled with brass from melted down wartime ammunition:
BENEATH THIS STONE RESTS THE BODY
OF A BRITISH WARRIOR
UNKNOWN BY NAME OR RANK
BROUGHT FROM FRANCE TO LIE AMONG
THE MOST ILLUSTRIOUS OF THE LAND
AND BURIED HERE ON ARMISTICE DAY
11 NOV 1920, IN THE PRESENCE OF
HIS MAJESTY KING GEORGE V
HIS MINISTERS OF STATE
THE CHIEFS OF HIS FORCES
AND A VAST CONCOURSE OF THE NATION
THUS ARE COMMEMORATED THE MANY
MULTITUDES WHO DURING
THE GREAT WAR OF 1914- 1918
GAVE THE MOST THAT MAN CAN GIVE LIFE ITSELF FOR GOD
FOR KING AND COUNTRY
FOR LOVED ONES HOME AND EMPIRE
FOR THE SACRED CAUSE OF JUSTICE AND
THE FREEDOM OF THE WORLD
THEY BURIED HIM AMONG THE KINGS
BECAUSE HE HAD DONE GOOD
TOWARD GOD AND TOWARD HIS HOUSE
When Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon married the future King George VI on 26th April 1923, she laid her wedding bouquet on the Tomb on her way into Westminster Abbey. It was in tribute to her brother, Fergus, who had died at the Battle of Loos (and whose name was listed at that time among the missing at the Loos Memorial). Since then, royal brides have their bouquet laid at the tomb the day after their weddings. Before she died in 2002, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon (then The Queen Mother) expressed her wish that her funeral wreath be laid at the tomb after her death. Her daughter, Queen Elizabeth II, laid the wreath the day after the funeral. To date more than 70 heads of state have laid wreaths at the tomb.
The French created a reciprocal tomb, following the same processes and interring their own Unknown Warrior at the ‘Arc de Triomphe’ in a simultaneous ceremony to that in Westminster. On 17th October 1921, the Unknown Warrior was given the United States highest award for valour, the Medal of Honor. This award, from the hand of General John Pershing hangs on a pillar close to the tomb. The following year, on 11th November 1921, the American Unknown Soldier was reciprocally awarded the Victoria Cross. In the late 1990’s, the BBC commissioned a TV series to mark the end of the Millennium. Their aim was to find out who the public rated as history’s Greatest Britons. It is telling that Britain’s Unknown Warrior rated as the 76th most popular choice in the public vote.
