Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Unknown Warrior came home
A HUNDRED years ago today, a solitary carriage rode through London’s streets bearing the remains of a soldier brought home from the battlefields of France.
The procession was bigger than any seen in this country before or since.
Historians say the great funerals of Queen Victoria and Winston Churchill were small in comparison.
Yet no one knew, or will ever know, the name of the young man honoured that day in 1920 – the Unknown Warrior, buried in Westminster Abbey alongside the most famous names in British history.
The idea was to give a focal point for the grief of people who lost loved ones in the Great War, which ended two years earlier.
It was devised by the Rev David Railton who, as an Army chaplain on the Western Front, had seen a grave marked by a rough cross, dedicated to An
Unknown British Soldier.
At first there was some resistance. King George was worried about making life even harder for those bereft.
But Prime Minister David
Lloyd George recognised the idea’s importance and it was given the go-ahead.
The remains of four anonymous British soldiers were brought from the battlefields at the Somme, Ypres, the Aisne and Arras then laid on stretchers, covered with Union Jacks and placed in a chapel at St Pol in northern France.
Just after midnight Brigadier General Louis John Wyatt, commander of the British troops in France and Flanders, made his choice. Rumours later swirled that Wyatt knew who they were all along.
To dispel the myth, he wrote: “In front of the altar was the shell of the coffin which had been sent from England to receive the remains.
“I selected one [of the bodies] and with the assistance of Colonel Gell, placed it in the shell; we screwed down the lid.
“The other bodies were removed and reburied in the military cemetery outside my HQ at St Pol. I had no idea even of the area from which the body I selected had come; no one else can know it.”
The remains were taken to Boulogne and placed in a coffin made of two-inchthick oak from a tree that had grown at Hampton Court Palace.
The coffin was covered with a flag used as an altar cloth during the war. A 16th century Crusader sword, taken from the Tower of London collection, was placed in the iron bands that held the coffin.
The Unknown Warrior was taken on HMS Verdun to Dover and by train to London where the body was placed in a horse-drawn carriage.
It was taken first to the newly unveiled Cenotaph and then on to Westminster Abbey through streets lined with hundreds of thousands of people paying their respects.
King George dropped handfuls of French earth into the grave.
It was later sealed and inscribed with the Bible passage: “They buried him among the kings, because he had done good toward God and toward his house.”