The Tomb of the Unknown Warrior

This year marks the centenary of the burial of the unknown warrior. The idea of such a tomb goes back to 1916 and an army chaplain called David Railton.  He’d seen a grave marked by a rough cross, and on it was written in pencil 'An Unknown British Soldier'.  After the war he wrote to the Dean of Westminster proposing that an unidentified British soldier from the battlefields in France should be buried in Westminster Abbey "amongst the kings" to represent the many hundreds of thousands of Empire dead.  

But who should it be – after all, by definition it had to be the body of someone unknown.  So six bodies were exhumed from six different battlefields and brought to a chapel.  Two senior officers went into the chapel where the remains were on stretchers each covered by Union Flags.  The most senior officer was blind folded and laid his hand on one of the bodies. The two officers placed the body in a plain coffin and sealed it. The other bodies were then taken away for reburial.

The coffin of the chosen coffin was then placed in a casket of the oak timbers of trees from Hampton Court Palace.    The casket was banded with iron and a medieval crusader's sword, chosen by the king personally from the Royal Collection, was affixed to the top and surmounted by an iron shield bearing the inscription 'A British Warrior who fell in the Great War 1914-1918 for King and Country'.

 With great ceremony the casket was taken back to Westminster Abbey.  First it travelled on a French military wagon, drawn by six black horses. It was saluted by Marshal Foch and then piped aboard the destroyer, HMS Verdun.   The Verdun was joined by an escort of six battleships.  As the flotilla carrying the casket landed in Dover it received a 19 gun Field Marshall's salute. It was carried to London in the railway carriage which had previously carried the body of Edith Cavell. The train went to Victoria Station, where it remained overnight.

 On the morning of 11 November 1920, the casket was placed onto a gun carriage of the Royal Horse Artillery and drawn by six horses through immense and silent crowds. As the cortege set off, a further field marshal's salute was fired in Hyde Park.  The casket was then followed by the king, the Royal Family and ministers of state to Westminster Abbey, and was carried into the West Nave of the Abbey flanked by a guard of honour of recipients of the Victoria Cross.

The guests of honour were a group of about one hundred women.   They had been chosen because they had each lost their husband and all their sons in the war.  The coffin was then buried in the far western end of the nave, only a few feet from the entrance, in soil brought from each of the main battlefields, and covered with a silk pall. Servicemen from the armed forces stood guard as tens of thousands of mourners filed silently past.

The grave was then capped with a black Belgian marble stone.  You may walk on any floor tomb in the Abbey except that one and it bears an inscription engraved with brass from melted down wartime ammunition.  It reads

“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 November: 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.”