Tomb of the Unknown Warrior

Just caught a piece about it on The One show and saw my grandad, as he was the Sgt in charge of the party carrying the coffin. My mother gave the Royal Artillery museum a letter signed by Winston Churchill sent to his CO asking for permission for him to be let off duties to carry out the function.

Sorry for mis spelling in title but dont know how to edit it.

BensGrandad said:

Just caught a piece about it on The One show and saw my grandad, as he was the Sgt in charge of the party carrying the coffin. My mother gave the Royal Artillery museum a letter signed by Winston Churchill sent to his CO asking for permission for him to be let off duties to carry out the function.

Sorry for mis spelling in title but dont know how to edit it.

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You should be very, very proud of that BG.

A great honour indeed.

excellent mate

That's a great story. Nice one BG, you can be rightly proud. Any chance of a photo uploaded here?

Is he there?

No he was the one at the back of the coffin directing operation not one of the pall bearers. He is the one with 3 stripes if you can get a bigger picture covering the whole party.

Hillian1 said:

You should be very, very proud of that BG.

A great honour indeed.

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Absolutely THIS.

I changed the title - You can click on 'edit' and then 'Go Advanced' to change a title.

A massive honour, indeed.

Have any efforts been made to find out who 'unknown warrior' was or would that dispel the magic?

As was explained it was just a soldier who has never been identified and was ceremoniously buried as a token honour to many who died without their identiity being known. I said just a soldier but that was not meant in any derogatory manner or belittling his or any others efforts and bravery.

A sad fact of WW1 was that so many of the fallen were so badly / violently killed / mutilated that there were not enough "pieces" left to identify the person. Not pleasant .... I believe their headstones stated "Known only unto God".

Barrel of Fun said:

I changed the title - You can click on 'edit' and then 'Go Advanced' to change a title.

A massive honour, indeed.

Have any efforts been made to find out who 'unknown warrior' was or would that dispel the magic?

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If I recall correctly, three bodies were brought back, one from each service who were unidentified in unmarked coffins,, one was chosen at random to become "Known only to God"

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-11710660

The unknown warrior was carried from a French battlefield 90 years ago, to be laid to rest among kings and statesmen in Westminster Abbey. But how did this symbol of the sacrifice of war come to be chosen?

In 1916, a Church of England clergyman serving at the Western Front in World War I spotted an inscription on an anonymous war grave which gave him an idea.

The Reverend David Railton caught sight of the grave in a back garden at Armentieres in France in 1916, with a rough cross upon which was pencilled the words "An Unknown British Soldier".

In August 1920 Mr Railton wrote to the Dean of Westminster, Herbert Ryle, to suggest having a nationally recognised grave for an unknown soldier. The idea - which had also been mooted by the Daily Express newspaper the year before - was presented to the government and quickly taken up.

Memories of the war, in which a million British people had died, were still raw and the thousands of bodies that lay unidentified were a blight on Britain's conscience.

"Those parents and wives who had lost men to war didn't have anything tangible to grieve at, so the unknown warrior represented their loss," says Terry Charman, a historian at the Imperial War Museum.

But there was a procedure in choosing a single corpse to represent the many unnamed dead. The unknown warrior's body was chosen from a number of British servicemen exhumed from four battle areas - the Aisne, the Somme, Arras and Ypres. These remains were brought to the chapel at St Pol on the night of 7 November 1920, where the officer in charge of troops in France and Flanders, Brig Gen L J Wyatt, went with a Col Gell.

Neither had any idea where the bodies, laid on stretchers and covered by union jacks, were from.

The point was that it literally could have been anybody," says Mr Charman. "It could have been an earl or a duke's son, or a labourer from South Africa.

"The idea really caught the public mood, as it was a very democratic thing that it could have been someone from any rank."

Gen Wyatt selected one body - it has been suggested he may have been blindfolded while making his choice - and the two officers placed it in a plain coffin and sealed it. The other bodies were reburied.

The next day the dead soldier began the journey to his final resting place. The coffin was taken to Boulogne and placed inside another coffin, made of oak from Hampton Court and sent over from England. Its plate bore the inscription: "A British Warrior who fell in the Great War 1914-1918 for King and Country".

This second coffin had a 16th Century sword, taken from King George V's private collection, fixed on top.

The body was then transported to Dover via the destroyer HMS Verdun and taken by train to London.

To have its own unknown warrior, for a country that sent troops to WWI, is part of its own national identity”

On the morning of 11 November 1920 - two years to the day after the war had ended, the body of the unknown warrior was drawn in a procession through London to the Cenotaph. This new war memorial on Whitehall was then unveiled by George V.

At 1100 there was a two-minute silence, and the body was then taken to nearby Westminster Abbey where it was buried, passing through a guard of honour of 100 holders of the Victoria Cross.

In a particularly poignant gesture, the grave was filled with earth from the main French battlefields, and the black marble stone was Belgian.

And at the exact time Britain was interring its unknown warrior, France was doing the same - burying its Soldat Inconnu at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.

But while the coffin in London had been laid with great ceremony, no-one was exactly sure how the public would respond to this new memorial. In the event, they flocked to it. An estimated 1,250,000 people visited the Abbey to see the grave in only the first week.

Ninety years on, the dead soldier continues to be honoured, by the public and royalty alike.

What's more, the symbolism of the act has been mirrored by many other countries around the world. Iraq, the United States, Germany, Lithuania and Poland are just some of those which have created their own memorials.

As a footnote to this the railway van used to transport the Unknown Warrior has been preserved and restored as a memorial/museum.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavell_Van

On the way back from Italy a couple of years ago, my wife and I had a couple of nights in Arras, Northern france, which really is a lovely place. We visited the main war cemetery there, which has a massive memorial in it, designed by Edwin Lutyens, which carries the names of all those who were killed between the Spring of 1916 and sometime in August 1918(i.e. for only half the length of the war), and only in the Arras Region, of all those who had been lost "with no known grave".

There are nearly 35,000 names on the memorial. Both my wife and I have great-uncles whose names are on there. It is an awesome place.

And near Southampton there is a war cemetery at Netley, part of the Royal Victoria Country Park, where there used to be a huge military hospital, where casualties where brought back from Fraance between 1914 and 1918. If you walk round there, you will see clusters of German war graves, some of which are marked "ein unbekannter Soldat" - an unknown soldier. I guess some people might not like that, but it brought tears to my eyes the first time I saw one.

DavidinSouthampton said:

On the way back from Italy a couple of years ago, my wife and I had a couple of nights in Arras, Northern france, which really is a lovely place. We visited the main war cemetery there, which has a massive memorial in it, designed by Edwin Lutyens, which carries the names of all those who were killed between the Spring of 1916 and sometime in August 1918(i.e. for only half the length of the war), and only in the Arras Region, of all those who had been lost "with no known grave".

There are nearly 35,000 names on the memorial. Both my wife and I have great-uncles whose names are on there. It is an awesome place.

And near Southampton there is a war cemetery at Netley, part of the Royal Victoria Country Park, where there used to be a huge military hospital, where casualties where brought back from Fraance between 1914 and 1918. If you walk round there, you will see clusters of German war graves, some of which are marked "ein unbekannter Soldat" - an unknown soldier. I guess some people might not like that, but it brought tears to my eyes the first time I saw one.

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We used Arras as a base a few years back to visit The Somme, Vimmy Ridge, Thiepval, Beamont Hamell, Delville Wood etc.

The most humbling experience of my life, it's difficult to gauge the true scale of it all until you've stood and looked at the battlefields, including at one point where the trenches were about 20 feet apart.

Many thanks to Eaglesdestroy seagulls for uploading that video. I watched it and must admit I shed a tear being so proud of my granddad, who incidentally first took me to watch Brighton. At 01;25;40 they back the coffin off of the gun carriage and remove their hats. Granddad can clearly be seen as the last soldier without a hat just in front of 3 or 4 officers wearing hats. I am so proud of him I have had to phone my sons to have a look at their great grandad and hope that they arer similarly proud. Once again many many thanks to EDS.

BensGrandad said:

Many thanks to Eaglesdestroy seagulls for uploading that video. I watched it and must admit I shed a tear being so proud of my granddad, who incidentally first took me to watch Brighton. At 01;25;40 they back the coffin off of the gun carriage and remove their hats. Granddad can clearly be seen as the last soldier without a hat just in front of 3 or 4 officers wearing hats. I am so proud of him I have had to phone my sons to have a look at their great grandad and hope that they arer similarly proud. Once again many many thanks to EDS.

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No problem, I thought it better than the photographs for posterity. If you want to PM me an email address I will download it via real player and send it over to you via email so you can actually keep the copy. If you know what you are doing though it is easy enough to download for yourself.

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A grandad to be very proud of BG, enshrined in history.